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c/oackgtoandd of 
Joitezatuzes 






My Study Fire 

My Study Fire, Second Series 

Under the Trees and Elsewhere 

Short Studies in Literature 

Essays in Literary Interpretation 

Essays on Nature and Culture 

Essays on Books and Culture 

Essays on Work and Culture 

The Life of the Spirit 

Norse Stories 

William Shakespeare 

The Forest of Arden 

A Child of Nature 

Works and Days 

Parables of Life 

In Arcady 





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One Outlook (oompany 

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' 11 



THE 




C 








OCT 14 


1903 


Copyright 


ti.tij 


CLASSO CL. 


XXc. No ; 


COPY B. ' 



Copyright, 1903, by 
The Outlook Co. 



THE DE VIKKE PRESS 



Cj- 

s 



TO 

LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

THE LAKE COUNTRY AND WORDSWORTH 1 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 57 

THE WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY . . 99 

WEIMAR AND GOETHE 135 

THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 181 

AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY . . . 195 

THE LAND OF SCOTT . . 247 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



Dove Cottage, Grasmere Frontispiece 

Honister Crag and Pass 5 

Hawkshead, where Wordsworth went to School . . 11 

Kirkstone Pass 18 

Ullswater 23 

Rydal Mount 29 

Striding Edge, Helvellyn 36 

Langdale Pikes 41 - 

Derwentwater 47 

Emerson's Home from the Orchard 56 -' 

Drawn by Elizabeth Wentwortb Roberts 

The Great Meadows 63 - 

Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts 

The Pines of Walden 69 

Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts 

The Elms of the Concord River 76 

Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts 

A Corner of the Study 81 

Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts 



x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Early Morning at the Old Manse 87 

Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts 

Walden Ledge by Moonlight 94 

Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts 

Sunnyside 98 

The Entrance to Sleepy Hollow 103 

On Sleepy Hollow Brook 109 » 

Old Willows near Tarrytown 115 

Along Sleepy Hollow Brook on the Old Philipse 

Manor 122 

The Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery 127 

Goethe's House 134 

Goethe's Working-room 141 

The State Church at Weimar 147 

The Castle and Ducal Palace 155 

The Bronze Serpent in the Park 162 

The Garden of Goethe's House 167 

A Corner in the Garden 175 

The Valley of the Doones 180 

Whitman's Birthplace 194 

Old Well at Huntington 204 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi 



PAGE 



The Garden of Whitman's House in Camden . . . 217 

At Cold Spring Harbor, where Whitman had his 

First Glimpse of the Sea 227 - 

A Byway in Huntington 237 

Whitman's Grave at Camden 241 

Abbotsford 246 

The Brig o' Turk 251 v 

St. Margaret's Loch and Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh . 258 

Edinburgh Castle 263 

Loch Achray and Ben Venue 270 

Dryburgh Abbey 275 

The Canongate Tolbooth, Edinburgh 282 • 

Loch Katrine 287 

Melrose Abbey 294 

The Quadrangle, Edinburgh University . . . . 299 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 
AND WORDSWORTH 




THE LAKE COUNTRY 
AND WORDSWORTH 



He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears. 
He laid us as we lay at birth, 
On the cool flowery lap of earth ; 
Smiles broke from us and we had ease; 
The hills were round us, and the breeze 
Went o'er the sunlit fields again; 
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
Our youth return'd; for there was shed 
On spirits that had long been dead, 
Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, 
The freshness of the early world. 




and purity of 



O wrote Matthew Arnold in 
1850, when the long life of 
Wordsworth ended and he 
was laid at rest in the 
churchyard at Grasmere, 
the Rotha sweeping past his 
grave with the freshness 
the mountains in its bosom. 
3 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

Half a century has passed since the bells in 
the old square tower tolled on that memor- 
able day, but the peace with which the poet 
touched the fevered life of the century has not 
lost its healing, nor has his message lost its 
power. There are still differences of opinion 
concerning minor points in his work, but his 
genius is no longer questioned ; and his art, in its 
best moments, has won complete recognition. 
Some foreign critics, it is true, have doubted and 
even sneered; but one of the most valuable of 
recent contributions to the large literature 
which has grown up about Wordsworth comes 
from the hand of a very intelligent and sympa- 
thetic French critic. It is safe to say that, in the 
settled opinion of this country and of England, 
Wordsworth gave the world between 1798 and 
1815 work that has enriched English poetry for 
all time both in substance and in form. For 
this poetry had not only a new music for the ear 
which made men think suddenly of mountain 
brooks ; it had also a new view of nature and a 
new conception of life. * 

A poet so freighted with spiritual insight, 
with meditative habit, and with moral fervor, is 



*3 

P 

- 




AND WORDSWORTH 

always in danger of straining his art and dissi- 
pating its magic in the endeavor to produce 
ethical results; and a touch of didacticism ban- 
ishes the bloom and dissolves the spell. There 
was in Wordsworth a natural stiffness of mind 
which showed itself more distinctly as time im- 
paired the vivacity of his moods and the fresh- 
ness of his imagination. He was, by instinct 
and the habit of a lifetime, a moralist ; and there 
were times when he came perilously near being 
a preacher in verse. He was, as often happens, 
radically unlike the popular impression of him; 
he and Keats have been widely and astonish- 
ingly misunderstood. One constantly comes 
upon expressions of the feeling that Words- 
worth had the calmness of the philosophic tem- 
per, and that he was by nature self -poised and 
cold ; and this in the face of the fact that one of 
the great qualities of his verse is its passion! 
Wordsworth was, by nature, headstrong, ar- 
dent, passionate, with great capacity for emo- 
tion and suffering ; the sorrows of his life shook 
him as an oak is shaken by a tempest, and years 
afterward, when he referred to the deaths of his 
children or of his brother, his emotion was pain- 

7 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

f ul to look upon. He bore himself with a noble 
fortitude through the trials and disappoint- 
ments of his long career ; but that fortitude was 
won through struggle. He had a stubborn will, 
which became inflexible when a principle was 
involved; he passed through a great spiritual 
crisis when the French Revolution first liber- 
ated and then blasted the hopes of ardent and 
generous spirits in Europe; he sought seclusion 
and maintained it to the end; he was rejected 
and derided by the great majority of those who 
made literary opinion during his youth and ma- 
turity ; and his verse brought him no returns, al- 
though he had both the need and the wholesome 
desire for adequate payment for honorable 
work. 

All these and other conditions told against 
the free development of the pure poetic quality 
in Wordsworth's nature, and against that spon- 
taneity which is the source of natural magic in 
poetry. It is not surprising that he wrote so 
much didactic verse; it is surprising that he 
wrote so much poetry of surpassing charm and 
beauty. When all deductions are made from 
his work, there remains a body of poetry large 

8 



AND WORDSWORTH 

enough and beautiful enough to place the poet 
among the greatest of English singers. At his 
best no one has more of that magic which lends 
to thought the enchantment of a melody that 
seems to flow out of its heart as the brook runs 
shining and singing out of the heart of the hills. 
No English poet has command of a purer 
music, and none has more to say to the spirit ; he 
speaks to the ear, to the imagination, to the in- 
tellect, and to the soul of his fellows. He was 
always high-minded, devoted to his work, stain- 
less in all his relations; during fifteen golden 
years he was so in tune with Nature that she 
breathed through him as the wind breathes 
through the harp, and the deep silence of the 
hills became a haunting music in his verse, and 
the inarticulate murmur of the mountain 
streams a reconciling and restful melody to 
tired spirits and sorrow-smitten hearts. Such 
a life is a spiritual achievement; add to it a 
noble body of poetry, and the measure of 
Wordsworth's greatness and service becomes 
more clear, although that measure has not yet 
been finally taken. 

In this poetry Nature is not only presented 
9 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

in every aspect, but is interpreted in a way 
which was in effect a revelation. It is true, 
poets as far back as Lucretius had conceived of 
Nature as a whole, and had felt and expressed 
the inspiration which flowed from this great 
conception; but Wordsworth was the first poet 
in whose imagination this view of the world 
was completely mastered and assimilated; the 
first poet who adequately presented Nature, 
not only as a vast unity of form and life, but 
as a sublime symbol; the first poet who suc- 
ceeded in blending the life of man with Nature 
with such spiritual insight that the deeper corre- 
spondences between the two were brought into 
clear view, and their subtle and secret relations 
indicated. He is constantly spoken of as pre- 
eminently the poet of Nature, because in no 
other English verse does Nature fill so vast a 
place as in his poetry; but he was even more 
distinctly the poet of the spirit of man, discern- 
ing everywhere in Nature those spiritual forces 
and verities which came to consciousness in his 
own soul, and those hints and suggestions of 
spiritual truth which found in his own spirit an 
interpreter. 

10 




Hawkshead, where Wordsworth went to School 



AND WORDSWORTH 

It was inevitable that a poetry of Nature 
which was, at bottom, a poetry of life, with Na- 
ture as a background, a symbol, a spiritual en- 
ergy, a living environment, should have its 
roots deep in the soil and should reflect, not 
general impressions of a universe, but aspects, 
glimpses, views of a world close at hand. In 
art great conceptions are successfully presented 
only when they find forms so beautiful and in- 
evitable that the thought seems born in the 
form as the soul is lodged in the body; not con- 
ditioned by it, but so much a part of it that it 
cannot be localized, and so pervasive that it 
irradiates and spiritualizes every part. In like 
manner, in his best moments, Wordsworth fills 
our vision with the beauty of some actual scene 
or place before he opens the imagination by 
natural and inevitable dilation to some great 
poetic idea. In the noble " Lines written above 
Tintern Abbey,'' in which his imagination rises 
to a great height and his diction rises with it on 
even wing, we are first made to see with mar- 
velous distinctness the steep and lonely cliffs, 
the dark sycamore, the orchard-tufts, the 
hedge-rows — " little lines of sportive wood run 

13 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

wild " — the pastoral farms and wreaths of 
smoke, before we are brought under the spell 

of 

That serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections lead us on, 

and we become living souls and see into the 
heart of things. In like manner the great Ode 
rises from familiar things — the rose, the moon, 
the birds, the lamb, the sweet, homely sights and 
sounds — to that sublime height from which the 
whole sweep and range of life become visible. 
And the lover of Wordsworth who recalls the 
Highland girl, the dancing daffodils, and a 
hundred other imperishable figures and scenes, 
knows with what unerring instinct the poet fas- 
tens upon the familiar and near when he pur- 
poses to flash into the imagination the highest 
truths. 

Wordsworth's poetry has a singular unity 
and consistency; from beginning to end it is 
bound together not only by great ideas which 
continually reappear, but it is harmonized by a 
background which remains unchanged from 
stage to stage. This double unity was made 
possible by the good fortune of a lifelong resi- 

14 



AND WORDSWORTH 

dence in the Lake Country. With the excep- 
tion of the years at Cambridge, when he was 
a student in St. John's College, and later in 
London and Dorsetshire, and of occasional 
visits to the Continent, the poet spent his whole 
life almost within sight of Skiddaw and Hel- 
vellyn. In childhood, youth, maturity, and age 
he saw the same noble masses of mountain, the 
same sleeping or moving surfaces of water; he 
heard the same music of running streams and 
the same deep harmonies of tempests among 
the hills. The sources of his poetry were in his 
own nature, but its scenery, its incidents, its 
occasions, are, with few exceptions, to be found 
in the Lake Country. No one can catch all the 
tones of his verse who has not heard the rush 
of wind and the notes of hidden streams in that 
beautiful region; no one can fully possess the 
rich and splendid atmosphere which gathers 
about his greater passages who has not seen the 
unsearchable glory of the sunset when the up- 
per Vales are filled with a mist which is trans- 
formed into such effulgence of light as never yet 
came "within the empire of any earthly pencil." 
In a word, the poetry of Wordsworth is rooted 

15 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

in the Lake Country as truly as the other 
flora of that region; and the spirit and quality 
of the landscape not only come to the surface 
in separate poems and in detached lines, but 
penetrate and irradiate the whole body of his 
verse. 

The poet was born at Cockermouth, on the 7th 
of April, 1770, the second son of John Words- 
worth, law agent of the Earl of Lonsdale. The 
town is in the northeastern part of the Lake 
region, not many miles from the English Chan- 
nel, and within sound of the water of the Der- 
went. On the main street of the old market 
town stands the plain, substantial, two-storied 
house, spacious and comfortable, in which Wil- 
liam and Dorothy were born ; for the two names 
ought never to be separated, the sister's pas- 
sionate devotion and genius contributing not 
only to the brother's growth and comfort, but 
to his work. To the south rises the castle, half 
in ruins; about are soft, grassy hills. The 
garden at the back of the house, with its hedges 
and the river murmuring near, was the play- 
ground of the children. There flowers bloomed 

16 



AND WORDSWORTH 

and birds built safely, and the days went by in 
a deep and beautiful calm: 

Stay near me : do not take thy flight ! 
A little longer stay in sight! 
Much converse do I find in thee, 
Historian of my infancy! 
Float near me: do not yet depart. 
Dead times revive in thee: 
Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art ! 
A solemn image to my heart, 
My father's family ! 

Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days, 
The time, when, in our childish plays, 
My sister Emmeline and I 
Together chased the butterfly! 
A very hunter did I rush 
Upon the prey; with leaps and springs 
I followed on from brook to bush; 
But she, God love her! feared to brush 
The dust from off its wings. 

In the " Prelude " Wordsworth has left to 
the world a unique autobiography; a human 
document of the highest interest. In this story 
of his poetic life the landscape of his physical 
life is reflected in almost numberless glimpses, 
from his childhood to those rich years at Gras- 

19 



THE LAKE-COUNTRY 

mere. In this meditative, descriptive poem, as 
in a quiet stream, his childhood and youth are 
preserved, and we are enabled to note the scenes 
and incidents which left their permanent im- 
press on his memory. Under the northwest 
tower of the Castle at Cockermouth the Der- 
went runs swift and deep, and sweeps tumultu- 
ously over the blue-gray gravel of the shallows 
which spread out from the bank opposite. The 
boy never forgot this striking effect, and years 
after he wrote of 

. . . the shadow of those towers 
That yet survive, a shattered monument 
Of feudal sway, the bright blue river passed 
Along the margin of our terrace walk. 

Standing in the garden at the back of the 
house, he saw constantly the footpath that led 
from the ford over the rocky brow of a neigh- 
boring hill ; and that worn line of human travel 
became a highway to his imagination: 

... a disappearing line, 
One daily present to my eyes, that crossed 
The naked summit of a far-off hill 
Beyond the limits that my feet had trod, 
Was like an invitation into space 
Boundless, or guide into eternity. 

20 



AND WORDSWORTH 

In 1778 the boy was sent to the Grammar 
School at Hawkshead, founded by Archbishop 
Sandys in 1585, at that memorable time when 
William Shakespeare, escaping from the tasks 
of the Stratford Grammar School and the quiet 
which broods along the banks of the slow-mov- 
ing Avon, had gone up to London to seek and 
find the greatest fortune of literary opportu- 
nity and fame which has yet come in the way of 
mortal man. The school is still largely un- 
changed ; there is a spacious room on the ground 
floor where the ancient hum of industrious boys 
is still heard ; there is a small library made up of 
gifts from the students, each pupil presenting 
a volume when he leaves the school. The names 
of the Masters are preserved on a tablet in this 
room, and in an oaken chest the original charter 
of the school is kept. The old oak benches in 
the lower room bear witness to the traditional 
activity of the jack-knife, and " W. Words- 
worth " is cut deeply in the wood. Here the 
boy worked at his books for eight happy years ; 
boarding, as was the custom of the place, with 
a village dame — Anne Tyson — for whom he 
came to have a deep and lasting affection. The 

21 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

house in which she lived, like its fellows in the 
village, is small and unpretentious. The village 
lies in the beautiful country between Winder- 
mere and Coniston Water, with Esthwaite 
Water close at hand. It is a quaint old market 
town, with narrow streets, low archways, houses 
with many-paned windows; the old church 
dominating the place: 

The snow-white church upon the hill 
Sits like a throned lady, sending out 
A gracious look all over her domain. 

The " Prelude " lingers long over the scenes, 
incidents, and experiences of the eight years at 
Hawkshead; and it would be quite impossible 
to find a locality more nobly planned for the 
unfolding and enrichment of a poet's imagina- 
tion. The lover of Wordsworth can still feel 
something of the spell which was laid upon the 
boy in those golden days of fresh and aspiring 
youth. The teaching which the school gave 
was, for its time, admirable; but the deepest 
education was gained out of school hours, and, 
largely, out of doors. The memory of those 
years was always fresh and grateful: 

22 



AND WORDSWORTH 

Well do I call to mind the very week 
When I was first intrusted to the care 
Of that sweet Valley. 

The " Prelude " makes us aware of the spir- 
itual richness and growth of these school days; 
of the joy of reading and the deeper joy of 
seeing; of long walks of exploration; of silent 
hours upon Esthwaite, or, in vacation, upon 
Windermere, when the deep and solemn beauty 
of mountain and star sank into his heart : 

Dear native Regions, wheresoe'er shall close 
My mortal course, there will I think on you ; 
Dying, will cast on you a backward look; 
Even as this setting sun (albeit the Vale 
Is nowhere touched by one memorial gleam) 
Doth with the fond remains of his last power 
Still linger, and a farewell luster sheds 
On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose. 

Within easy walking distance one comes 
upon some of the most impressive or enchant- 
ing scenery of the Lake Country. Winder- 
mere, with its group of mountains ; the striking 
lines of the Uangdale Pikes, and other peaks, 
crowd the horizon in all directions. To the 
west, over the hill, through lovely stretches of 

25 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

meadow or across the moorland, lies Conis- 
ton Water, with the massive front of Coniston 
Old Man rising across the quiet lake. One 
cannot look down on that exquisite Valley with- 
out thinking of Brantwood, and of the last of 
the group of great writers who were contempo- 
raneous with Wordsworth's later years. 

The leisure hours of that happy time were 
not, however, wholly given over to wandering 
and solitude; there was companionship with 
books as well: 

Of my earliest days at school [writes the poet] 
I have little to say, but that they were very happy 
ones, chiefly because I was left at liberty there, and 
in the vacations, to read whatever books I liked. For 
example, I read all Fielding's works, Don Quixote, Gil 
Bias, and any part of Swift that I liked, Gulliver's 
Travels and The Tale of a Tub being both much to 
my taste. It may be, perhaps, as well to mention that 
the first verses which I wrote were a task imposed by 
my master — the subject, The Summer Vacation; and 
of my own accord I added others upon Return to 
School. There was nothing remarkable in either poem ; 
but I was called upon, among other scholars, to write 
verses upon the completion of the second centenary 
from the foundation of the school in 1585 by Arch- 
bishop Sandys. These verses were much admired — ■ 

26 



AND WORDSWORTH 

far more than they deserved, for they were but a tame 
imitation of Pope's versification, and a little in his 
style. 

The real education of the boy — the libera- 
tion of his imagination and the unfolding of 
his spiritual nature — was gained, however, in 
the woods and fields and upon the quiet lakes. 
Esthwaite, Windermere, and Winander, and 
the mountains which encircled them and made 
them a world by themselves, were his most po- 
tent teachers. Here, in boyhood, he began to 
reveal that union of exact observation with 
imaginative insight which was to give his po- 
etry vividness of pictorial effect and depth of 
spiritual suggestion. He learned both to see 
the object upon which his eye rested, and also, 
by a sudden extension of vision, to discern its 
significance in that invisible order of which all 
things seen are but types and symbols. And 
out of this clarity and range of vision there 
came the double beauty of his verse : the beauty 
of the flower or tree or landscape suddenly and 
vividly presented to the imagination, and the 
beauty of the great world of earth and sky 
which enfolds flower and tree and landscape; 

27 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

the beauty of the daffodil dancing along the 

margin of the bay, and that other beauty which 

flashes upon 

. . . that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude. 

In October, 1787, Wordsworth left the Lake 
Country for the first time and took up his resi- 
dence in the southwestern corner of the first 
quadrangle of St. John's College, Cambridge. 
Here he found another kind of beauty: the 
beauty of low-lying fields, of streams that run 
through marshes to the sea, of low, veiled skies. 
Here, too, was the ripe loveliness of an ancient 
seat of learning; and here, above all, were the 
richest traditions and associations of English 
poetry. Those glorious windows and noble 
roofs which Milton loved so well Wordsworth 
loved also, and from those dark carven seats 
where one sits to-day under the spell of choral 
singing of almost angelic sweetness he doubtless 
searched, with reverent gaze, 

That branching roof 
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells 
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells 

28 



— 

o 

- 

S3 




AND WORDSWORTH 

Lingering, and wandering on as loth to die — 
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof 
That they were born for immortality. 

Having taken his Bachelor's degree in Janu- 
ary, 1791, Wordsworth went up to London, 
uncertain as to his future vocation. Every 
reader of his poetry knows how vividly he saw 
certain things in London — the thrush that sang 
on Wood Street, and by the magic of its notes 
made poor Susan suddenly aware of trees 
and mountains, of rolling vapor and running 
streams; and that noble vision from Westmin- 
ster Bridge; but the great city touched him 
mainly as it reminded him of things remote 
from its turmoil and alien to its mighty rush 
and war of strife and toil. In November of the 
same year he landed in France, at the very mo- 
ment when the hopes of humanity were still full 
winged on their sublimest flight; hopes so soon 
to fall, maimed and bruised, to the earth whence 
they had risen with such exultant joy. The 
spiritual crisis through which the ardent young 
poet passed lies outside the scope of this article; 
it may be said in passing, however, that those 
who are tempted to make the usual common- 

31 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

place comments on his subsequent change of 
attitude will do well to study first the tempera- 
ment of one whose nature had a kind of ocean- 
like capacity for emotion, and whose convictions 
were born in absolute integrity of thought. The 
world would not willingly lose Browning's strik- 
ing lines on " The Lost Leader "; but the world 
is glad to remember that the younger poet, with 
characteristic candor, in later and wiser years 
disclaimed his interpretation of the older poet's 
course. 

In 1795 Wordsworth made his first home! 
at Racedown, in Dorsetshire. His sister joined 
him, and that beautiful companionship, which 
was to be one of the prime sources of his in- 
spiration, brought him calmness and hope af- 
ter months of darkness and discouragement. 
Here began that long career which was not 
only to develop poetic genius of a high order, 
but to illustrate a devotion to the things of 
the spirit so nobly sustained that the history 
of literature hardly affords its parallel. The 
beginnings were not very promising; the poet 
seemed to need the touch of some quicker mind 
than his own. The impulse came two years 

32 



AND WORDSWORTH 

later when Coleridge became the guest of the 
quiet household, and in one of the long walks 
in which the two poets and Dorothy Words- 
worth found such delight, the "Ancient Mar- 
iner " was planned. In the autumn of the fol- 
lowing year a new date was made in English 
literature by the appearance of the "Lyrical 
Ballads." To that slender volume Wordsworth 
contributed both his weakness and his strength; 
it contained "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot 
Boy," but it also contained "Expostulation and 
Reply " and " The Tables Turned." Above all, 
it gave the world the "Lines written above Tin- 
tern Abbey," in which the genius of the poet 
touched its highest reach of insight and power. 
The poet was now on the threshold of his 
great career; there were before him fifteen 
years in which the breath of inspiration touched 
him again and again, and he sang with the mag- 
ical ease of the bird; after this productive dec- 
ade and a half the glow slowly faded, the spell 
was broken, the magic lost. At the very begin- 
ning of this epoch in his spiritual and artistic 
growth, Wordsworth, with his sister, returned 
to the Lake Country, from which he never 

33 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

again departed save for brief journeys or visits. 
In the very heart of that lovely region he found 
the home of his genius and of his affections. 
"To be at Grasmere," wrote Dorothy, "is like 
being at a natural church. To spend one's holi- 
day there is like having a week of Sundays." 
And now, nearly a century later, the Vale still 
keeps its ancient silence despite the tide of 
travel which follows the highways. One may 
stand to-day in the ancient churchyard and feel 
the peace of the landscape enfolding him as it 
enfolded Wordsworth. The latest poet to cele- 
brate the sacred associations of the place has 
not missed the repose which the older poet loved 
so well: 

Afar though nation be on nation hurled, 

And life with toil and ancient pain depressed, 

Here one may scarce believe the whole wide world 
Is not at peace; and all men's hearts at rest. 

In December, 1799, when the Wordsworths 
took possession of Dove Cottage, the tiny, blue- 
gray stone house was almost without neigh- 
bors, and the lake lay before it like a mirror; 
to-day it is part of a small but compactly built 
village. It faces the lake, which is but a short 

34* 




- 

> 

X 
<v 

=£ 

a 

E 



AND WORDSWORTH 

distance from its door; there is a small orchard 
and garden at the back, so rich in foliage that 
it is like a fragrant bower ; the spring still over- 
flows in its little bowl ; the rocks, overhung with 
vines, rise abruptly from the natural seat which 
Coleridge cut for Wordsworth ; and the outlines 
of the house are almost invisible, so rich are the 
masses of vine and foliage which have over- 
grown and enriched it. Nature has taken the 
Cottage into her own keeping and made it 
part of the landscape. The elder-tree which 
once hung its blossoms near the little porch has 
gone, but a profusion of wild flowers obliterates 
all traces of its loss. Through a tiny vestibule 
the visitor enters the largest room in the house, 
and is amazed to find it so small; for the great- 
ness of the poetry with which the Cottage is 
associated somehow affects the image one has 
unconsciously made of it. Sixteen feet long 
and twelve broad, with dark oak wainscoting 
from floor to ceiling, a large fireplace, lighted 
by a cottage window embowered in jasmine — 
this was the place where Wordsworth received 
his friends, and where, far into the night, Cole- 
ridge's magical voice went sounding the deeps 

37 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

of thought. Climbing the narrow stairs, one 
comes to a tiny room where the poet kept his 
books and where he often wrote ; his study was, 
however, out-of-doors. In the little guest- 
rooms Coleridge, Scott, De Quincey slept. In 
one of these rooms Coleridge first read "Chris- 
tabel " to Wordsworth ; there Dorothy and 
Coleridge often talked until the stars began 
to fade. " Every sight and sound reminds me 
of Coleridge," wrote Dorothy in later years; 
" dear, dear fellow — of his many talks to us, 
by day and night — of all dear things." In the 
house, or about it, gather some of the richest 
traditions of English literature. That marvel- 
ous boy, Hartley Coleridge, played in the gar- 
den ; the small figure of the " Opium Eater," 
with his dark, expressive face, was often seen 
in the same garden which, years later, was to 
be the silent witness of his own strange strug- 
gles; within the shelter of this orchard-garden, 
too, Southey read aloud " Thalaba" ; here Sir 
Humphry Davy brought not only his fame but 
his unfailing charm of gracious manners and 
gayety of spirits ; and here the Magician of the 
North wove those ancient spells which none who 

38 



AND WORDSWORTH 

came near enough to understand his noble na- 
ture ever escaped. On a memorable day in 
1805, Davy, Scott, and Wordsworth climbed 
the long and rugged ascent of Helvellyn — 

Old Helvellyn's brow, 
Where once together, in his days of strength, 
We stood rejoicing as if earth were free 
From sorrow, like the sky above our heads. 

No presence, however great, lends such 
beauty and dignity to Dove Cottage as Doro- 
thy Wordsworth gave it out of the richness 
and nobility of her rare nature. Here she 
showed, as in a parable, the imperishable sweet- 
ness of self -forgetful love; here, in lifelong 
devotion, she poured out the treasures of her 
mind and heart for the enrichment of one who, 
without the warmth of affection, the quick sym- 
pathy, the fruitful suggestiveness she gave him, 
would have been poor indeed, with all his later 

fame: 

The blessing of my later years 
Was with me when I was a boy; 
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
And humble cares, and delicate fears, 
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears, 
And love, and joy, and thought. 

39 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

To this cottage came, later, the wife who 
was to widen without impairing the circle of 
comprehension and devotion which wove about 
the poet a magical barrier against the coldness 
of the world. No man of genius ever owed 
more to women than Wordsworth, and none 
has more richly repaid their devotion; for none 
has interpreted the finest qualities of woman- 
hood with greater purity of insight. The most 
magnificent compliment ever paid to a woman 
was penned by Shakespeare, whose genius is 
never more searching in its insight or felicitous 
in phrase than when it deals with ideal women; 
but Wordsworth's tributes to the highest quali- 
ties of womanhood are unsurpassed in delicacy 
and dignity. Who has ever spoken of woman 
with a finer instinct than the poet who wrote: 

And she hath smiles to earth unknown; 
Smiles, that with motion of their own 
Do spread, and sink, and rise; 
That come and go with endless play, 
And ever, as they pass away, 
Are hidden in her eyes. 

But Dove Cottage was but a personal shelter 
in a country which, in its entirety, was the home 

40 



jitj^jnML'. \ j^ '*.. 'ifyl-. ■■ 


r^ * 


"S^M»* ' 




v* fc ' "^«r o -Taa^ -" -vi^ ■ • - 


Kp^^*?* -^**7*>- 








| 








HHHHIHr^HHH BJB •/?§■ 



AND WORDSWORTH 

of Wordsworth's genius. " This is the place 
where he keeps his books," said a servant to 
the visitor at Rydal Mount; "his study is out- 
of-doors." From 1798 to the hour of his 
death in 1850 the poet lived in the larger world 
which spread from his door to the horizon. He 
knew every path, summit, glen, ravine, outlook 
in that country; he was on intimate terms with 
every flower, tree, bird; he saw the most deli- 
cate and elusive play of expression on the face 
of that world, the shy motions of its most fugi- 
tive life; he heard every sound which issued 
from it. One has to walk but a little way from 
the cottage to see, spread before him, the ma- 
jesty and loveliness of that landscape. The old 
road from Grasmere to Ambleside, which 
Wordsworth haunted not only with his pres- 
ence but with the murmured tones of his verse, 
climbs the near hill, and there lies the vaster 
world! — the little blue-gray village of Gras- 
mere, at the head of the lake on the right, with 
the great mass of Helvellyn towering behind it ; 
stretches of green meadows fringing green 
waters; the solitary island with its pines; Sil- 
verhorn and Helmcrag; the ridge of Lough- 

43 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

rigg, where the poet loved to walk; and, on the 
left, Rydal Water set like a jewel among the 
hills. 

Between December, 1799, and May, 1808, 
while the Wordsworths were living in Dove 
Cottage, the poet composed " Michael," " The 
Cuckoo," " The Wanderer," " The Leech-ga- 
therer," " The Butterfly " — which describes the 
orchard-garden—" The Daisy," " Alice Fell," 
" The Beggars," the " Ode to Duty," " The 
Waggoner," " The Character of the Happy 
Warrior," "The White Doe of Rylstone." 
Here the great Ode on Immortality was begun, 
and here " The Prelude " and " The Excur- 
sion " were largely written. In the seclusion of 
this tiny garden Wordsworth's poetic prime was 
reached, and here his genius touched its highest 
mark of expression. 

In 1808 the cottage became too small for the 
growing family, and the Wordsworths removed 
to Allan Bank, a larger house at the north end 
of Grasmere. From thence, in 1811, another 
move was made to the Rectory, a very charm- 
ing place opposite the church and within sound 
of the swiftly running Rotha. Here sorrow 

U 



AND WORDSWORTH 

lived with the Wordsworths and became their 
familiar companion. Of their five children 
two died under this roof: Catherine, whom De 
Quincey loved with such intensity of ardor that 
he was terribly shaken by her sudden death — 
"never, from the foundation of these mighty 
hills," he wrote, " was there so fierce a convul- 
sion of grief as mastered my faculties on receiv- 
ing that heart-shattering news"; and Thomas, 
who followed his sister after a brief interval. 
Wordsworth's grief was, after the manner of 
the man, deep and passionate ; forty years later 
he could not speak of these sorrows of his early 
life without agitation and suffering. The chil- 
dren sleep in the churchyard across the nar- 
row road from the Rectory, and the associa- 
tions of the place so weighed upon the poet's 
spirit that another and final removal was made 
in the spring of 1813 to Rydal Mount. 

Few houses have been described so often, and 
none more perfectly matches the picture of a 
poet's home as the imagination instinctively 
conceives it. Standing on the rocky side of 
Nab Scar, above Rydal Lake, almost concealed 
by the vines which have grown apparently into 

45 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

its very structure, its terraces rich in hedges and 
foliage, Rydal Mount is a type of English re- 
pose, maturity, and natural loveliness. As one 
walks up the quiet road past the little church, 
the stir and turmoil of life are so distant and 
alien that one wonders if they be not the dreams 
of a disordered mind. Here are silence, seclu- 
sion, fathomless depths of greenness, enchant- 
ing beauty of glancing water and wandering 
mountain line. 

At Rydal Mount " The Excursion " was fin- 
ished, and " Laodamia," the " Evening Ode," 
" Yarrow Revisited," and the series of Eccle- 
siastical Sonnets written. The magical quality, 
the inimitable charm, of the " Daffodils," the 
" Solitary Reaper," the " Cuckoo," had van- 
ished, the didactic note had become more dis- 
tinct; but in his happiest hours the poet still 
had command of a noble style. Mr. Myers has 
noted the striking and beautiful close of 
Wordsworth's poetic life. It was in 1818 when 
Nature seemed to take solemn farewell of the 
genius which she had inspired, and which had, 
in turn, been her interpreter. There came one 
of those sunsets sometimes seen among the 
Cambrian hills, the splendors of which not only 

46 



AND WORDSWORTH 

pass quite beyond speech, but impress even the 
unimaginative as almost apart from the ordi- 
nary processes of Nature. The earth and the 
sky, in the radiance of shifting cloud and fold- 
ing mist, seem to blend together into a new and 
unspeakably wonderful world of light and 
color and spiritual splendor. Under the spell 
of that vision the poet's imagination rose once 
more to its earlier level in the " Evening Ode, 
composed on an evening of extraordinary 
splendor and beauty": 

No sound is uttered, but a deep 

And solemn harmony pervades 
The hollow vale from steep to steep, 

And penetrates the glades. 
Far distant images draw nigh, 

Called forth by wondrous potency 
Of beamy radiance, that imbues 
Whate'er it strikes with gem-like hues! 

In vision exquisitely clear 
Herds range along the mountain side; 
And glistening antlers are descried, 

And gilded flocks appear. 

The poet seemed to recognize the decline of his 
poetic power, the hardening of his faculties ; for 
he adds, with pathetic clearness of insight: 

49 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored ; 

Which at this moment, on my waking sight, 
Appears to shine, by miracle restored! 

My soul, though yet confined to earth, 

Rejoices in a second birth; 
— 'T is past, the visionary splendor fades ; 
And night approaches with her shades. 



In 1843, on the death of Southey, Words- 
worth was persuaded to accept the position of 
Poet Laureate, and nobly wore the honor 
through seven years of unbroken silence. And 
in this vine-embosomed house, in April, 1850, 
the end came. As he had lived, so he died, in 
simple but sublime repose. The stream of visi- 
tors who pour through the Grasmere church- 
yard cannot destroy the spell of solemn silence 
which enfolds the poets' corner in that beauti- 
ful place of death and life. The old church, 
the steep hill, the shining thread of waterfall, 
the silent curve and sweep of the Rotha, the 
tombs of the poets — for William, his wife, 
Dorothy, and Hartley Coleridge lie together 
in that sacred place — who is not the better for 
the sight and the memory of them! 

The Lake Country is not only the natural 
50 



AND WORDSWORTH 

but the spiritual background of Wordsworth's 
poetry. That poetry was, with few important 
exceptions, written there; in very many in- 
stances it grew out of localities which have been 
accurately determined, or was suggested by in- 
cidents which are still remembered; so intimate, 
indeed, is the connection between the great mass 
of the shorter poems and the landscape and life 
of the region that the verse seems but the de- 
scription and interpretation of landscape and 
life. In the longer poems passage after passage 
can be assigned to definite places or connected 
with persons and incidents. But in a still deeper 
and more spiritual sense was Wordsworth's im- 
agination affected by the little world of moun- 
tain, lake, and cloud in which he lived. That 
country suggests and illustrates, in a marvelous 
way, the two distinctive characteristics of Words- 
worth's poetry : clear, accurate sight of the fact, 
and the sudden expansion of the vision to take 
in its largest relations and its most far-reaching 
spiritual symbolism. Wordsworth's genius was 
notable for its twofold recognition of the famil- 
iar and the sublime in Nature, its closeness of 
observation and its clearness of imaginative in- 

51 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

sight, its scientific exactness and its poetic vi- 
sion; if the phrase may be permitted, Words- 
worth habitually saw both the human and the 
divine sides of Nature — the fragrant orchard 
at his door, and the last sublime reach of moun- 
tain as it fades into sky. 

The Lake Country presents both these as- 
pects of Nature. The mountains are not high, 
and yet they are touched with sublimity; the 
cattle browse on their grassy slopes, and yet 
infinity and eternity seem somehow embodied 
in them. They are both familiar and mysteri- 
ous. More than this, they suggest in the most 
subtle way the play of the imagination. 
Through the upper Vales the mists continually 
roll in from the sea, and the whole country is 
enfolded in an atmosphere which brings with it 
all the magic of light and shade, all the mystery 
of shadow and distance and the commingling 
of sky and earth. Miracles of light and color 
are daily wrought among those hills; enchant- 
ments and spells are woven there which the 
imagination cannot escape. The real and the 
visionary continually intermingle. The atmo- 
sphere works such marvels that it becomes a vis- 

52 



AND WORDSWORTH 

ible type of the play and processes of the im- 
agination. In that country, as in the poetry 
of its interpreter, there are always the solid 
mass, the definite outline, the substantial form; 
and there is also the finer and visionary world 
into which the real world seems to rise, and 
with which it seems to blend in a whole which 
is both perishable and imperishable, both ma- 
terial and spiritual: the unity of the seen and 
the unseen. No one understood this subtle 
quality of the Lake Country landscape better 
than Wordsworth, and no one has so clearly 
defined and described it as he in the follow- 
ing passage : 

The rain here comes down heartily, and is frequently 
succeeded by clear, bright weather, when every brook 
is vocal and every torrent sonorous ; brooks and torrents 
which are never muddy even in the heaviest floods. 
Days of unsettled weather, with partial showers, are 
very frequent; but the showers darkening or brighten- 
ing as they fly from hill to hill are not less grateful 
to the eye than finely interwoven passages of gay and 
sad music are touching to the ear. Vapors exhaling 
from the lakes and meadows after sunrise in a hot sea- 
son, or in moist weather brooding upon the heights, 
or descending towards the valleys with inaudible motion, 
give a visionary character to everything around them; 

53 



THE LAKE COUNTRY 

and are in themselves so beautiful as to dispose us to 
enter into the feelings of those simple nations (such 
as the Laplanders of this day) by whom they are 
taken for guardian deities of the mountains; or to 
sympathize with others who have fancied these delicate 
apparitions to be the spirits of their departed an- 
cestors. Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting upon 
the hill-tops; they are not easily managed in picture, 
with their accompaniments of blue sky, but how glori- 
ous are they in nature ! how pregnant with imagination 
for the poet ! 



54 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 




MERSON was born in what 
has become one of the busi- 
est sections of Boston; but 
when the future poet and 
thinker opened his eyes in 
this world, on the 25th day of 
May, 1803, it was in a Con- 
gregational parsonage " in the silence of retire- 
ment, yet in the center of the territory of the 
metropolis," where, to continue the words of 
his father, " we may worship the Lord our 
God." That was the lifelong occupation of 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it is interesting to 
note that from the beginning it was singularly 
free from conventions and forms of every kind. 
Nature is, to most men, a middle term between 

59 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

God and man; to Emerson it was a common 
ground over which the Universal Spirit always 
brooded, and where the open-hearted might 
happen upon inspiring hours, He felt the 
sublimity of the Psalms of David, and the no- 
ble swell of the Te Deum, the ancient hymn 
which the centuries have sung, never left him 
cold; but his highest thoughts came to him 
in the broad silence of summer afternoons 
in the fields, or when the stars kept up 
the ancient splendor of the wintry heavens. 
" Boys," Dr. Holmes reports him as saying to 
two youths who were walking with him as they 
entered the wood, " here we recognize the pres- 
ence of the Universal Spirit. The breeze says 
to us in its own language, How dye do? How 
d'ye do? and we have already taken our hats off 
and are answering it with our own How d'ye 
do? How d'ye do? And all the waving 
branches of the trees, and all the flowers, and 
the field of corn yonder, and the singing brook, 
and the insect, and the bird — every living thing 
and things we call inanimate feel the same di- 
vine universal impulse while they join with us, 
and we with them, in the greeting which is the. 

60 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

salutation of the Universal Spirit." In the life 
of the author of " Wood-notes," as in that of 
the author of the great ode on " Intimations of 
Immortality," Nature was a background so 
intimately and reverently lived with that the 
work of both poets was not only colored but 
penetrated by it. 

Favorable conditions conspired in Emerson's 
ancestry, birth, and childhood to make him pe- 
culiarly sensitive to the influence of star and 
field and wood, by familiarizing him with the 
simplest habits of life and centering his inter- 
est in the things of the mind. He was the child 
of a long line of highly educated and poorly 
paid ministers; men who had the tastes and 
resources of scholars, but whose ways of living 
were as frugal as the ways of the poorest far- 
mers to whom they preached. "We are poor and 
cold, and have little meal, and little wood, and 
little meat," wrote his father at the close of his 
Harvard pastorate and on the eve of the re- 
moval to Boston, " but, thank God, courage 
enough." 

The moral fiber of the stock was as vigorous 
as its life had been self-denying and abstemi- 

61 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

ous; but it must not be imagined that the long 
line of ministers behind Emerson were pallid 
ascetics. When his father was on the verge of 
death, he wrote to a relative: " You will think 
me better, because of the levity with which this 
page is blurred. Threads of this levity have 
been interwoven with the entire web of my life." 
This touch of gayety could hardly be called 
levity; it was, rather, the overflow of a very 
deep spring in the hearts of a race of men and 
women who kept their indebtedness to exter- 
nal conditions at the lowest in order that they 
might possess and use freely the amplest in- 
tellectual and spiritual means. Again and 
again, in the simple but noble annals of this 
family, whose name was on the college roll in 
every generation, one comes upon the fruit of 
this kind of frugality of appetite in the fine 
use of common things, and, above all, in an 
intimate sense of access to Nature and the 
right to draw freely on her resources of beauty 
and power. 

This ancestral heritage of simple fare and 
good books first comes to light in the little com- 
munity with which the greatest of the long line 

62 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

of scholars and teachers is so intimately asso- 
ciated that to think of "Nature" and "Wood- 
notes " is to see Concord lying in quiet beauty 
in a tranquil New England landscape. There 
were Emersons in the pulpit in Ipswich and 
Mendon, but it is upon Peter Bulkeley, grand- 
father at the seventh remove of Ralph Waldo, 
that attention rests as typical ancestor. He 
was descended, one of the oldest of the colonial 
chronicles tells us, from an honorable family of 
Bedfordshire; educated at St. John's College, 
Cambridge, of the rich tone of whose second 
quadrangle Ruskin spoke with enthusiasm ; was 
given a goodly benefice, but found himself later 
unable to conform to the services of the English 
Church; came to New England in 1635, and 
after a brief stay in Cambridge " carried a good 
Number of Planters with him, up further into 
the Woods, where they gathered the Twelfth 
Church, then formed in the Colony, and call'd 
the Town by the name of Concord." 

This pioneer scholar is described as a well- 
read person, an exalted Christian, who had the 
reverence not only of his own people but of all 
sorts of people throughout the land, and espe- 

65 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

daily of his fellow-ministers, who would still 
address him asa" Father, a Prophet, a Coun- 
sellor on all occasions." He had, we are told, 
" a competently good stroke at Latin Poetry," 
and he gave no small part of his library to Har- 
vard College. William Emerson, who came 
five generations later, was as notable a leader 
in Concord as his great-great-grandfather had 
been. He preached the gospel of resistance to 
tyrants and practiced it as well; for he left the 
pulpit in Concord to join the army at Ticon- 
deroga. When the miniature but immensely 
significant fight in which 

. . . the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world, 

took place at the bridge, he stood on the steps 
of the Old Manse, which he had built ten years 
before, and was kept out of the fray only by 
the vigorous intervention of his friends. 

In 1834, when Ralph Waldo Emerson was 
at the end of his period of apprenticeship, had 
withdrawn from the pulpit and made his first 
memorable trip to Europe, he went back to the 
Old Manse in Concord as to his ancestral home ; 

66 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

henceforth he was to know no other. His 
grandfather, Dr. Ripley, sustained in the fa- 
mous old house the best traditions of his race; 
" he was a natural gentleman,' ' wrote Emerson 
in a charming character study; " no dandy, but 
courtly, hospitable, manly, and public-spirited; 
his nature social, his house open to all men. 
His brow was serene and open to his visitor, 
for he loved men, and he had no studies, 
no occupations, which company could inter- 
rupt." 

In September of the following year Emer- 
son took his young wife to live in the house 
which was to be his home to the end, and which 
has become, by reason of its association with 
him and his friends, one of the places which 
both illustrate and interpret American life at 
its best. The village of Concord was then the 
quietest of rural communities; no trains con- 
nected it with Boston; no literary pilgrims vis- 
ited it; no city folk had discovered it. It was 
rich in historical associations; it had long been 
the home of a small group of families of social 
and intellectual distinction; the memories of its 
heroic age were still fresh in the minds and 

67 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

hearts of elderly people; but it did not stand 
out as yet on the map of the modern world. It 
was what Dr. Holmes would have called a 
Brahman town; in quality and dignity of char- 
acter and habit it held a place by itself; and 
when, later, three or four men of genius made 
it famous, it seemed as if they had revealed 
Concord to the world rather than imparted to 
it a sudden prestige by reason of their residence 
there. 

The country which was to be the background 
of Emerson's life and work was in such conso- 
nance with his temper and habits that, as in the 
case of Wordsworth and the English lake coun- 
try, it is not fanciful to trace a real rather than 
an accidental relation and resemblance between 
the men and the landscapes they loved. In a 
very true sense, all history and all countries 
were behind Emerson's thought and work; he 
seemed to have the two hemispheres in his brain, 
one lobe being Oriental and the other Occi- 
dental. In certain moods he was of the East 
as distinctly as in the applications and urgency 
of his thought he was of the West. He was 
akin with Saadi in the breadth of his view and 

68 




The Pines of Walden 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

the catholicity of his experience; and he was 
brother to Hafiz, not in physical delight in fra- 
grance and melody, but in instinctive ease in 
softening the hard line of the fact by evoking 
its mystical significance. He was enamored of 
Plato, and spoke of him with more warmth of 
advocacy than was in his tones in urging the 
claims of any other man of representative 
genius. He valued the Roman power of or- 
ganization; he felt the immense sense of reality 
in Dante's symbolism of the experience of the 
soul in the three worlds; he had read nearly all 
the fifty-five volumes of Goethe that he owned 
in the German, although he was never a 
methodical reader, and he was in deep sym- 
pathy with Goethe's great contemporaries; and 
he was at home in the wide range of English lit- 
erature. He moved lightly through the store- 
house of the past, with sound knowledge of 
what it contained and with a sure instinct of 
finding what was of value to him. He bor- 
rowed generously, as he had a right, from the 
capital of the race, and in every case he repaid 
the loan at a high rate of interest. 

Cosmopolitan as Emerson was in his inter- 
71 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

ests, his surroundings, his tastes, he was never- 
theless a true New Englander of the Concord 
quality. No one roamed further, but no one 
was a more devout home-keeper. He was eager 
to get the spiritual product, the deposit in the 
spirit, of the strain and storm of life; but he 
hugged his own hearth and was content to hear 
faint echoes of the tumult of life in the dis- 
tance. A cosmopolitan in the range of his in- 
telligence, he was a provincial in his habits and 
personal associations; and this was the prime 
characteristic of Concord. To a European it 
must have been a place of extraordinary con- 
trasts; it was the home of the loftiest idealism 
and of the simplest manner of life. The little 
group of men and women of culture, among 
whom Emerson took his place by personal and 
hereditary right, shared this habit of rural or 
rustic simplicity with the farmer folk who sur- 
rounded them. In the old-fashioned farm- 
houses, which stood and still stand along the 
roads or hidden among trees in sheltered nooks, 
there was a mingled air of thrift and gen- 
erosity. They were built on ample lines, and 
their frugality was tempered by hospitality. 

72 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

The living was of the plainest ; the mug of hard 
cider and the pot of beans were in every house ; 
but there were also reverence, sobriety, respect 
for learning, the peace of God, and a love of 
liberty that had elements of passion in it. 

" These poor farmers, who came up that day 
to defend their native soil," said Emerson in a 
memorable historical address, " acted from the 
simplest instincts; they did not know it was a 
deed of fame they were doing. These men did 
not babble of glory; they never dreamed their 
children would contend which had done the 
most. They supposed they had a right to their 
corn and their cattle — without paying tribute 
to any but their own Governors. And as they 
had no fear of man, they yet did have a fear of 
God." And he recalls the simple statement of 
one of these " embattled farmers " " that he 
went to the services of the day with the same 
seriousness and acknowledgment of God which 
he carried to the church." The spirit of the 
best in New England is revealed in these few 
words. They feared God, but they feared no- 
thing else ; they held to the highest truths in the 
simplest speech; and the best of them carried 

73 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

the world in their minds and stayed quietly at 
home. They had penetrated to the founda- 
tions; and although there was in Concord, as 
elsewhere in New England, an aristocracy of 
birth and intellect, men and women were hon- 
ored on a basis of character. 

This independence went so far that it some- 
times became whimsical, as in Thoreau, and 
sometimes issued in such an excess of noncon- 
formity that a man found it impossible to get 
on with his neighbors, and took refuge in isola- 
tion. The peculiarity of the New England 
hermit has not been his desire to get near to 
God, but his anxiety to get away from man. 
In later years, when Concord had become 
a Mecca, a whimsical self -consciousness was 
sometimes evident in the more individualistic 
members of the community. Alcott said that 
Thoreau thought he lived in the center of the 
universe and would annex the rest of the planet 
to Concord; while Thoreau's view of his own 
relation to the place is reflected in his confes- 
sion: "Almost I believe the Concord would not 
rise and overflow its banks again were I not 
here." This note of superiority did not es- 

74 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

cape the keen-witted neighbors of Thoreau. 
" Henry talks about Nature," said Madam 
Hoar, " just as if she 'd been born and brought 
up in Concord." 

Emerson was the highest type of this min- 
gled frugality of the life of the body and 
generosity of the life of the mind; of this har- 
monization of the highest and broadest interests 
with the simplest domesticity. He took plea- 
sure in dissociating the resources and distinc- 
tion of the intellectual life from the conventions 
and forms of an elaborate social life; and he 
seemed to affect in dress and manner a slight 
rusticity as heightening the effect of his 
thought, as the slight hesitation in his speech 
in public address brought out the marvelous fe- 
licity of his diction. He would not have dis- 
claimed the compliment of being called the 
' Yankee Plato " ; so entirely content was he to 
be a resident of Concord as well as a citizen of 
the world. In nothing was his soundness of 
nature, his health of mind, more evident than 
in the delicacy with which he protected himself 
from the intimacy of some who were eager to 
gain some personal possession of his thought, 

77 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

and the gentle persistency with which he held 
unbalanced people at a distance and kept him- 
self clear of all rash attempts to bring in the 
millennium prematurely. 

Hawthorne has given us a characteristic re- 
port of the strange folk to be met in Concord 
in the days of the " newness " : " It was neces- 
sary to go but a little way beyond my threshold 
before meeting with stranger moral shapes of 
men than might have been encountered else- 
where in a circuit of a thousand miles. These 
hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted 
thither by the wide-spreading influence of a 
great original thinker, who had his earthly 
abode at the opposite extremity of our village. 
His mind acted upon other minds of a certain 
constitution with wonderful magnetism, and 
drew many men upon long pilgrimages to 
speak with him face to face. Young vision- 
aries, to whom just so much insight had been 
imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around 
them, came to seek the clue that should guide 
them out of their self -involved bewilderment. 
Gray-headed theorists whose systems, at first 
air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron 

78 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

framework, traveled painfully to his door, not 
to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit 
into their own thralldom." 

No one will ever know the annoyances, per- 
plexities, and dangers of Emerson's position; 
what every one does know is that he never fell 
a victim to the countless illusions, delusions, 
and unbalanced dreams in which reproachful 
and perhaps impertinent followers, who mis- 
read his leading, endeavored to involve him. 
The foremost idealist of the New World, he 
rendered incalculable service to the cause he had 
at heart by holding it clean and clear above 
the touch of fanaticism, "impracticable experi- 
ment, and the bitterness of the egoistical 
reformer. If he had committed the fortunes 
of Idealism to a disastrous venture, the loss 
to the youth of America would have been 
irreparable. 

In April, 1824, two years before he took 
refuge in Concord, " stretched beneath the 
pines," Emerson wrote the poem which ex- 
presses the deepest instinct of his nature and 
the tranquillity and detachment he was to find 
in the quiet village : 

79 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

Good-bye, proud world ! I 'm going home : 

I am going to my own hearthstone, 
Bosomed in yon green hills alone, — 
A secret nook in a pleasant land, 
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; 
Where arches green, the livelong day, 
Echo the blackbird's roundelay, 
And vulgar feet have never trod 
A spot that is sacred to thought and God. 

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, 
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; 
And when I am stretched beneath the pines, 
Where the evening star so holy shines, 
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, 
At the sophist schools and the learned clan; 
For what are they all, in their high conceit, 
When man in the bush with God may meet? 

Emerson was in no sense a hermit; an invet- 
erate traveler of the mind, he was, for his time, 
an experienced traveler among his kind. His 
trips to Europe were memorable by reason of 
his quick and decisive insight, of which the 
"English Traits" is a permanent record; and 
by reason of what he brought back in broader 
sympathies and clearer discernment of the 
great race qualities. He was for many years 

80 




A Corner of the Study 



EMERSON AND CONCORD ^ 

a familiar and honored figure on the lyceum 
platform in distant sections of the country, and 
he came to have a wide knowledge of the 
United States of the middle decades of the 
nineteenth century. He had a keen appetite 
for good talk, and he was often seen in Cam- 
bridge and Boston in social gatherings great 
and small. But his genius was essentially 
meditative; he brooded over his subjects until 
they cleared themselves in his mind; he kept 
himself in an attitude of invitation, and his 
thoughts came to him; above all, his work was 
the fruit of the ripening of his own nature, and 
he needed alike the quiet of the fallow and of 
the growing field. The solitude in which a man 
finds himself and the silence in which his 
thoughts come to him he found in Concord. 

Tranquillity and peace were its possessions 
by reason of its isolation and of the conforma- 
tion of its landscape. Monadnock and Wachu- 
sett stood on the horizon for those who went to 
look at them; but Concord lay content along a 
river of slumberous mood, with a group of pel- 
lucid lakes or ponds within easy reach, with 
broad meadows and low hills and stretches of 

83 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

whispering pines at hand. It was a shire-town, 
and it had business relations with lumbermen 
and farmers who came to it for supplies. It 
was on the route of four stage lines, and under 
the roofs of as many taverns old-fashioned 
toddy was mixed for home consumption and as 
an expression of hospitality to guests and trav- 
elers. Thoreau noted in the quiet village all 
the signs of the ordinary uses and habits of 
men: " I observed that the vitals of the village 
were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, 
and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the 
machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a 
fire-engine at convenient places, and the houses 
were so arranged as to make the most of man- 
kind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that 
every traveler had to run the gauntlet, and 
every man, woman, and child might get a lick 
at him." 

It must be remembered, however, that two 
houses within call made a crowded community 
for Thoreau, and that the appearance of a 
strange or inquisitive person on the highway 
sent him incontinently into the woods. Con- 
cord, in the thirties and forties, was an entirely 

84 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

normal village, with the usual conveniences for 
conducting life ; but the life of the time was ex- 
ceedingly deliberate in movement, and the pas- 
sage of several stages a day did not make a 
fever in the blood of the villagers. Emerson 
found there seclusion without isolation, and 
solitude and silence tempered with the most con- 
genial companionship. 

The Old Manse, in which he lived for the first 
year, is a dignified old house, in a locality of 
heroic tradition, in a place of singularly repose- 
ful beauty, in so quiet an air that one can easily 
overhear the whisperings of the pines. Under 
its roof generations of gentlefolk have lived 
frugally and in loyal devotion to the highest in- 
terests of the spirit; from colonial days books 
of classic quality have been within reach in the 
halls and rooms ; in a small room on the second 
floor at the back of the house Hawthorne wrote 
a part of the " Mosses from an Old Manse " 
and Emerson wrote " Nature." When the lat- 
ter appeared anonymously, the question, "Who 
is the author of ' Nature ' ? " brought out the 
reply, " God and Ralph Waldo Emerson." 

If tranquillity is the distinctive note of Con- 
85 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

cord, a tinge of something dim and shadowy 
seems to touch the Old Manse and impart to it, 
not gloom nor sadness, but something of the 
twilight effect of the pine groves. When one 
recalls its traditions of plain living and high 
thinking, one is reminded of Dove Cottage ; but 
the little stone cottage embosomed in foliage 
where Wordsworth spent the most productive 
decade of his life is now a shrine set apart to 
memory, while the Old Manse is still a home 
from which in these later years has come picto- 
rial genius of a high order; and the impulses 
which have made Concord a place apart have 
not spent their force. 

In this rural community, snugly at home in 
a landscape full of repose, Emerson found the 
best conditions for his growth and work, and 
through his long life lived on most intimate 
terms with his nearest and most companionable 
neighbor, Nature. " Hail to the quiet fields of 
my fathers," he wrote when he had settled him- 
self in the Old Manse. " Not wholly unat- 
tended by supernatural friendship and favor 
let me come hither. Bless my purposes as they 
are simple and virtuous. . . . Henceforth I 

86 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

design not to utter any speech, poem, or book 
that is not entirely and peculiarly my work. I 
will say, at public lectures and the like, those 
things which I have meditated for their own 
sake and not for the first time with a view to 
that occasion." In these words is to be found 
the secret of his relation to Concord and of his 
beautiful and fruitful life; he came to Nature 
as to the word of God, and he gave the world 
only the ripe fruit of his quiet, meditative, con- 
secrated life. The twin activities of his spirit 
found their field and their inspiration under the 
open sky. He played with Nature and she 
worked with him. With him, as with Words- 
worth, his working-room was out-doors; his 
writing-room was the place where he made a 
record of his hours and studies under the open 
sky. No season barred the woods to his eager 
feet ; he was abroad in winter as in summer, and 
he loved lonely walks at night, finding compan- 
ionship with the stars full of inspiration. 

The pine woods brought him some of his hap- 
piest moods and many of his most felicitous 
thoughts and phrases. In all weathers he went 
abroad alert and expectant, waiting serenely 

89 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

and confidently on the ancient oracles; and, 
holding himself in this trustful, receptive atti- 
tude, the pines became for him 

Pipes through which the breath of God doth blow 
A momentary music. 

Thoreau, keen observer though he was, took 
into the woods a personality which affected his 
vision and made him the most conspicuous ob- 
ject in the landscape; Emerson left himself at 
home and brought to Nature the most receptive 
and impersonal of moods. He saw fewer 
things than Thoreau, but he saw more deeply. 
" But if I go into the forest," he wrote, " I find 
all new and undescribed; nothing has been told 
me. The screaming of wild geese was never 
heard ; the thin note of the titmouse and his bold 
ignoring of the bystander; the fall of the flies 
that patter on the leaves like rain; the angry 
hiss of some bird that crepitated at me yes- 
terday; the formation of turpentine, and, in- 
deed, every vegetation and animation, any and 
all, are alike undescribed. Every man that 
goes into the woods seems to be the first man 

90 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

that ever went into a wood. His sensations and 
his world are new. You really think that no- 
thing can be said about morning and evening, 
and the fact is, morning and evening have not 
yet begun to be described. When I see them 
I am not reminded of these Homeric or Mil- 
tonic or Shakespearian or Chaucerian pictures, 
but I feel a pain of an alien world, or I am 
cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, bud- 
ding, and melodious hour that takes down the 
narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsa- 
tion and life to the very horizon. That is 
Morning; to cease for a bright hour to be the 
prisoner of this sickly body and to become as 
large as the World." 

Compare this account of the attitude which 
Emerson took toward Nature with the fra- 
grant, dewy, glowing account of a day under 
the pure sky which Corot left among his rec- 
ords, and the secret of spiritual and artistic 
vitality and freshness is plain. The men of 
genius, who recreate life in art to assuage the 
thirst and renew the heart of the world, are im- 
mortal not only in their works but in them- 

91 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

selves; for they are the children of God, play- 
ing in a world in which their fellows toil. It is 
their happy lot to see all things afresh and keep 
the world young. 

There was a garden on the south side of the 
Emerson house, and apple-trees brought the 
most ancient fragrance and domestic associa- 
tions to the place; but Emerson was more at 
home in the broad landscape which inclosed 
his own acres. What the old road over the hill 
to Grasmere and Loughrigg Terrace were to 
Wordsworth in the long years at Rydal Mount, 
the Great Fields and Meadows, the shores and 
groves of white pine about Walden Pond, 
Peters Field, and the level stretches through 
which the Musketaquid, most quiet of rivers, 
flows, were to Emerson during the most fruit- 
ful period of his life. He found endless de- 
light in the ownership of a tract of land from 
which he could look down on Walden Pond 
and away to the farther hills : 

My garden is a forest ledge 

Which older forests bound; 
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, 
Then plunge to depths profound. 

92 




QC 



c 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

Self-sown my stately garden grows; 

The wind, and wind-blown seed, 
Cold April rain and colder snows, 

My hedges plant and feed. 

Emerson was not a successful farmer, 
though he had the respect of the practical 
farmers about him, and was known as " a first- 
rate neighbor and one who always kept his 
fences up " ; his business was not with the acres, 
but with the landscape. No one ever took am- 
pler or nobler harvests of the spirit off the land 
than Emerson. He had a keen eye for the 
small facts of natural life, but he cared 
chiefly for the vital processes, the flooding life, 
the revelation of truth, the correspondence of 
soul between man and Nature; he was, in a 
word, the poet in the woods and fields. With 
serene faith and loyal fellowship he kept 
friends with Nature from youth to age, and the 
joy of his intimacy suffered no shadow of es- 
trangement as the years went by. A walk in 
the woods, he declared, was " one of the secrets 
for dodging old age " ; and in an address " To 
the Woods " he wrote : " Whoso goeth in your 
paths readeth the same cheerful lesson, whether 

95 



EMERSON AND CONCORD 

he be a young child or a hundred years old. . . . 
Give me a tune like your winds or brooks or 
birds, for the songs of men grow old, when they 
are uprooted; but yours, though a man have 
heard them for seventy years, are never the 
same, but always new, like Time itself, or like 
love." 

To the very end this devout lover of Nature 
lived in daily intercourse with her, and it was 
during a walk in a cold April rain that he con- 
tracted the illness which proved fatal after a 
few days of sitting in his chair by the fire calmly 
waiting for death. In the quiet place where he 
lies, near Hawthorne and Thoreau, the pines 
seem to be always whispering among them- 
selves ; but, alas ! there is no longer one who un- 
derstands them. 



96 




3 

CO 

a 
c 

(A 



THE WASHINGTON IRVING 
COUNTRY 



THE WASHINGTON IRVING 
COUNTRY 




RVING and Longfellow 
were primarily translators 
and interpreters of the Old 
World to the New; to them 
was due in large measure the 
liberation of the young na- 
tion from provincialism, not 
by the use of fresh motives or of novel literary 
forms, but by bringing the American imagina- 
tion in touch with the imagination of Europe, 
and reknitting the deeper ties which had been, in 
a way, severed by forcible separation from Old 
World rule. There was, in the first three dec- 
ades of the nineteenth century, general depen- 
dence on European literature and general def er- 

101 



LofC. 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

ence to European taste; a dependence from 
which Emerson and Poe, by definite and urgent 
teaching as well as by practice of art with that 
freshness and force which always form another 
beginning, finally effected our liberation. 

This deferential attitude, this imitative spirit, 
had nothing in common with that assimilation 
of the experience, sentiment, poetic association, 
and historic charm of the older civilization which 
Irving and Longfellow effected. They assisted 
in the emancipation from servile imitation by 
greatly forwarding the equalization of the con- 
ditions of culture between the Old World and 
the New, and by bringing the New into spiritual 
sympathy with the Old. This work was differ- 
ent from that of Emerson and Poe, but Irving 
and Longfellow share the distinction of break- 
ing the formal while reuniting the vital ties, and 
thus preparing the way for the free interchange 
of influence on a basis of equality which to-day 
constitutes the rich spiritual commerce between 
the Old World and the New. To this great end 
Cooper was also a strenuous and effective 
worker; failing dismally when he tried the role 
of interpreter in " Precaution," succeeding on 

102 




. iSS 



f f '" 



>M *.. ^> 



The Entrance to Sleepy Holl( 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

original lines when he portrayed the fresh expe- 
riences and characteristic types of the new so- 
ciety in " The Spy " and " The Leatherstock- 
ing Tales." 

But while Irving and Longfellow were trans- 
lators in a high sense and with fresh feeling of 
the Old World to the New, they were also origi- 
nal forces in the literature of the new country. 
Their urbanity, geniality, hospitality of mind, 
and sweetness of nature gave them rare sensi- 
tiveness of feeling for things old and ripe and 
beautiful and a winning quality of style ; quali- 
ties which, among a people whose literature, dur- 
ing its first important period, was to carry sug- 
gestions of the pulpit with it, have tended 
somewhat to obscure their originality and sig- 
nificance. Longfellow was so gentle a preacher 
that, aside from a few poems so frankly didac- 
tic that we forgive their exhortations for the sake 
of the pure impulse they convey, the bands and 
gown are concealed under the singer's robes; 
while Irving's preaching was wholly the silent 
influence of one of the finest, kindliest, and 
truest of men. In the preponderance of ethical 
over artistic interests in this country Longfellow 

105 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

and Irving have carried less weight and made 
less impression than writers of more urgent ethi- 
cal impulse but of far less poetic and literary 
power. When a great deal of current writing 
has been forgotten, and much that Irving and 
Longfellow wrote has passed into the same obli- 
vion, it is safe to predict that " The Legend of 
Sleepy Hollow " and " Rip Van Winkle," and 
" Evangeline " and " Hiawatha," will hold their 
own because of their quality as literature and 
because they are part of the very limited legen- 
dary lore of America. Irving gave permanent 
form to the Knickerbocker tradition when he 
created Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van 
Winkle ; and in " The Legend of Sleepy Hol- 
low " he was not only the forerunner of the 
American novelist but the first American myth- 
maker. 

Like Longfellow and Cooper, he was often in 
Europe ; and it may be suspected that when these 
writers were young, and for a long time after, 
the new country was a lonely place for men who 
craved richness and beauty of life, the charm of 
old association, the ripeness of a society which 
had gotten through with foundation-laying, had 

106 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

built its roads, and had passed on to love things 
which are beautiful as well as to do things which 
are useful. 

Born in 1783, in the cosmopolitan city of New 
York, where even at that early period eighteen 
or twenty languages were spoken, Irving went 
to Europe in search of health in his twenty- 
second year; saw something of France, Italy, 
Holland, and England; enjoying with the 
freshness of a young imagination nature, art, 
society, and life. " I am a young man and in 
Paris," he wrote to a friend at home. Returning 
to New York in 1806, he took his place at once 
in the little group of wits and men-about-town, 
in the good sense of the phrase, of which Pauld- 
ing, Brevoort, Henry Ogden, and the Kembles 
were members — a spirited, vivacious company, 
with great capacity for enjoyment and with 
gifts of humor and satire which, under the influ- 
ence of Goldsmith, Addison, and the eighteenth- 
century essayists, were soon at work in the little 
city " to instruct the young, inform the old, cor- 
rect the town, and castigate the age," to quote 
from " Salmagundi," which ran its meteoric 
course in twenty numbers and then vanished in 

107 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

the mystery from which it had come. When 
"The History of New York by Diedrich Knick- 
erbocker " appeared, it reminded Walter Scott 
of Dean Swift and of Sterne. 

In 1815 Irving went to Europe for the second 
time, and seventeen years passed before he set 
foot in his native city again. During this period 
he wrote " The Sketch-Book," a collection of 
essays in his most characteristic vein, urbane, 
genial, full not only of Old World atmosphere, 
Old World grace, ease, mellowness of reflec- 
tion, and sentiment, but full also of New World 
feeling. " Bracebridge Hall " brought the fra- 
grance of old gardens and the dignity of old 
homes once more to the children of the men 
and women who had left them behind two cen- 
turies before ; " The Tales of a Traveler," which 
appeared two years later and was read witb 
eager interest, dealt with old things, but was full 
of novelty to the untraveled America of the 
third decade of the last century. " The Life of 
Columbus " was begun, and " The Tales of the 
Alhambra " and " The Conquest of Granada " 
were finished, during this long residence abroad ; 
and when he returned, in 1832, Irving's most 

108 




On Sleepy Hollow Brook 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

characteristic work was done. He was still to 
write " The Life of Washington," " Mahomet 
and his Successors," the charming account of 
Goldsmith, and other books; but he struck no 
new notes and disclosed no new qualities as a 
writer. 

At first glance it would seem as if Irving's 
work had been done against many backgrounds, 
English and Spanish as well as American, and 
as if his note had been cosmopolitan rather than 
American. The real Irving, however, was a 
true son of the country of which New York is 
the capital, and his characteristic and abiding 
work had behind it a city, a river, and a moun- 
tain range which were not simply the stage set- 
ting of his life, but which gave color, atmo- 
sphere, tone, to his writing. As a translator 
Irving rendered a great service to his country, 
and enriched its literature with the meditations 
on Westminster Abbey, the description of 
Stratf ord-on-Avon, and the group of studies of 
English life and landscape in " Bracebridge 
Hall " ; but the Irving who will be known to the 
future will be the Geoffrey Crayon of the 
Knickerbocker city, and the books which will 

111 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

live longest, because they are in material and 
manner most completely his own, will be the 
legends of the Hudson. 

His kindly and pervasive humor had as little 
in common with the keen, pungent New Eng- 
land humor as his genial and urbane spirit had 
with the strenuous, ethical temper of New Eng- 
land. The rigidity of the Puritan, the concen- 
tration of the reformer, were entirely alien to his 
tolerant nature. The intense feeling for the 
locality, the emphasis on the section, characteris- 
tic of the South from a very early period, were 
equally alien to him. He was a true child of the 
metropolis; tolerant in temper because he was 
on easy terms with many different races, urbane 
and gracious because he had found virtue in 
many kinds of men, charm in many kinds of 
women, and sincerity in many kinds of religion ; 
with a vein of deep and tender feeling running 
through his nature and his work, but always re- 
lieving the strain of emotion with that touch of 
humor which makes men kin. The qualities of 
the cosmopolitan city were all his: urbanity of 
manner, breadth of view, tolerance of temper, 
and a kindly, easy, genial attitude towards life. 

112 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

The atmosphere of the New York of the first 
quarter of the nineteenth century penetrates 
Irving's work as thoroughly as the air of Ayr- 
shire breathes through the songs of Burns, as 
the lonely loveliness and the wild ruggedness of 
Trossachs and lakes appear and vanish and re- 
appear in picture and vision in Scott's prose and 
verse, and the multitudinous murmur of waters 
of Cumberlandshire is heard in the poems of 
Wordsworth. 

There was no strain of didacticism in Irving, 
but there was an attitude towards life which gave 
his work a beautiful quality of sympathy. " If, 
however, I can by a lucky chance, in these days 
of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of 
care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment 
of sadness ; if I can, now and then, penetrate the 
gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a be- 
nevolent view of human nature, and make my 
reader more in good humor with his fellow- 
beings and himself, surely, surely I shall not 
then have written in vain." 

This is the temper of the true citizen of a me- 
tropolis — a place where races meet and mingle 
on easy terms; slowly and often blindly, but 

113 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

none the less surely, through mutual compre- 
hension and the tolerance that comes from it, 
defining in terms of experience the unity of the 
race and realizing the brotherhood of man. And 
it was still in the cosmopolitan temper that Ir- 
ving wrote to a friend: " I have preferred ad- 
dressing myself to the feelings and fancy of the 
reader more than to his judgment. My writings 
may appear, therefore, light and trifling in our 
country of philosophers and politicians. But 
if they possess merit in the class of literature 
to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire 
in the work." 

There was something of this breadth of hu- 
mor, this love of literature for itself and not 
as a tool for the preacher and the reformer, this 
old-fashioned, kindly, easy-going metropolitan 
temper, in the aspect and bearing of the man. 
" Forty years ago," writes Mr. Curtis, " upon 
a pleasant afternoon, you might have seen trip- 
ping with an elastic step along Broadway, in 
New York, a figure which even then would have 
been called quaint. It was a man of about sixty- 
six or sixty-seven years old, of a rather solid 
frame, wearing a Talma, as a short coat of the 

114 




Old Willows near Tarrytown 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

time was called, that hung from the shoulders, 
and low shoes, neatly tied, which were observable 
at a time when boots were generally worn. The 
head was slightly inclined to one side, the face 
was smoothly shaven, and the eyes twinkled 
with kindly humor and shrewdness. There was 
a chirping, cheery, old-school air in the whole 
appearance, an undeniable Dutch aspect, which, 
in the streets of New Amsterdam, irresistibly 
recalled Diedrich Knickerbocker. . . . This 
modest and kindly man was the creator of Died- 
rich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle. He 
was the father of our literature and at that time 
its patriarch." 

New York was a little city of about twenty- 
five thousand inhabitants, living well below the 
site of the present City Hall, when Irving was 
born in a house on William Street, between 
Fulton and John, and christened in St. George's 
Chapel in Beekman Street. He went to school 
in Ann and Fulton streets, but he was given 
more to wandering about the pier-heads and 
watching incoming and outgoing ships in fair 
weather than to orderly study. He came to 
know the little city intimately in its most char- 

117 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

acteristic aspects and localities ; for the loitering 
of an imaginative boy is a golden opportunity 
of getting at the heart of things. In this same 
blissful mood, while the mind was still much 
more concerned with the face of the world than 
with its own thoughts, he explored the secluded 
and solitary recesses of Sleepy Hollow and felt 
the quieting beauty of Tappan Zee on summer 
afternoons. A little later he made his first voy- 
age up the Hudson on a sloop — a voyage which 
was then more unusual and exciting than a voy- 
age across the Atlantic is to-day, and quite as 
long: 

" Of all the scenery of the Hudson," he wrote years 
afterwards, " the Kaatskill Mountains had the most 
witching effect on my boyish imagination. Never shall 
I forget the effect on me of my first view of them pre- 
dominating over a wide extent of country, part wild, 
woody, and rugged; part softened away into all the 
graces of cultivation. As we slowly floated along, I lay 
on the deck and watched them through a long summer's 
day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magi- 
cal effects of atmosphere; sometimes seeming to ap- 
proach, at other times to recede; now almost melting 
into hazy distance, now burnished by the setting sun, 
until in the evening they printed themselves against the 
glowing sky in the deep purple of an Italian land- 

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WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

scape. . . . To me the Hudson is full of storied asso- 
ciations, connected as it is with some of the happiest 
portions of my life. Each striking feature brings to 
mind some early adventure or en j oyment ; some favorite 
companion who shared it with me; some fair object, 
perchance, of youthful admiration, who, like a star, may 
have beamed her allotted time and passed away." 



This first voyage up the river with which he 
will always be associated was as truly a voyage 
of discovery as was Hendrik Hudson's in 1609; 
and it was the river in its entirety, its large lines, 
its atmosphere, rather than its details of curving 
shore and climbing hill, the sweep of its power- 
ful tide, that took possession of the boy's im- 
agination, and became as much a part of his life 
of the mind and of his work as the mountains 
about Cadore were a part of the mind and work 
of Titian. It was not until April, 1835, that he 
purchased Sunnyside, that secluded and fra- 
grant spot where he found such peace in his later 
years; and " Rip Van Winkle " had been pub- 
lished twelve years before its author set foot in 
the country which he had described more vitally 
than any other traveler has ever done. 

From the early days of his dreaming boyhood 
119 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

Irving knew the river in its large outlines, its 
noble molding of shore, its harmony of different 
types of landscape composed in one great pic- 
ture, its atmosphere and its associations. " Rip 
Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy 
Hollow," the most original and characteristic of 
Irving's creations, were written in England 
during the period when he was transcribing with 
a sensitive and sympathetic hand the ripe loveli- 
ness of the English country and the rich associa- 
tions of ancient structures and localities ; but the 
Hudson valley, from the city at its conflux with 
the Bay to the fastnesses of the Catskills, was 
the background against which his imagination 
was working, because it was the background of 
his childhood. 

It is now, perhaps, somewhat a matter of as- 
sociation, but there is a certain congruity be- 
tween Irving's work and his country. In his 
attitude towards his fellows, his bearing in the 
world, Geoffrey Crayon bore the impress of the 
little metropolis which he has made for all time 
the city of the Knickerbockers; for, although 
Diedrich Knickerbocker has never been seen 
since he climbed into the Albany stage leaving 

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WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

his bill at the tavern unpaid, he has left his name 
and the tradition of his quaint personality to 
the great metropolis to-day as its one touch of 
mythology — a bit of fable symbolical of a past 
which has been buried under crushing masses of 
stone and iron. In the free play of Irving's im- 
agination, in the geniality of his humor, in the 
ease and leisureliness of his mood, the character- 
istics of the larger background of his life are 
constantly suggested. If the Puritans had dis- 
covered the Hudson and turned its shores and 
current to thrifty account, it might have sug- 
gested movement, energy, the stir of active 
races ; it suggests instead repose, quietness, long 
summer days of a temperature which predis- 
poses to acceptance of what fortune brings 
rather than resolute grappling with adverse 
conditions. Sunnyside wears its name, after all 
these years and changes, with gracious assur- 
ance. Approached by a long shaded lane and 
embowered by trees, it still looks the summer in 
the face in the broad expanse of Tappan Zee. 

It was a happy stroke of felicitous description 
which called the quiet little vale where the Po- 
cantico takes its rise Sleepy Hollow; a place as 

123 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

reposeful, after all these bustling and hurrying 
years, as it was in the days when Irving first 
described its pastoral somnambulance; a place 
not so much for meditation as for those reveries 
which come between sleep and awakening and 
add the charm of consciousness to the sensuous 
delight of sleep. 

And although the Catskills have mass and no- 
bility of line which produce an impression out 
of proportion to their actual magnitude, they 
have friendliness of aspect, an air of quiet hos- 
pitality, a something which eludes analysis, 
which imposes respect and yet invites famili- 
arity. On summer afternoons they seem to sleep 
against the western sky; and a well-known 
artist, who has lived with them on terms of in- 
timacy for many years, is in the habit of saying 
that they frame the most magnificent sunsets in 
the world. They stand revealed in their mys- 
tery of noble repose only in the hours when the 
shadows lengthen and the light loses its garish- 
ness ; they are most expressive in the afternoon, 
when they seem sometimes to float in a mist of 
heat and to bound the horizon of the actual like 
noble visions of a world in which the light flows 

124 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

like molten gold. The White Mountains be- 
come bolder in the high light of morning, and 
invite strenuous approach and hint at great, 
positive rewards for the climber. 

In October the Catskills hold the very genius 
of the season in their keeping; so deep is the 
quiet that enfolds them, so rich the atmosphere 
in which they lie, removed at times as in a radi- 
ant mirage and again distinct in softened line 
and golden distance. 

Mr. Curtis has said, in pardonable poetic 
phrase, that the Rhine is lyrical and the Hudson 
epical. The Rhine is beautiful in localities, ro- 
mantic, picturesque, entirely apart from their 
manifold associations. The Hudson is beauti- 
ful in its totality, its sustained interest, its sin- 
gular harmony in diversity, its impressive con- 
tinuity of changing landscapes blending into a 
nobly composed picture. The Rhine has a swift 
current and gives one a sense of movement and 
agitation; the Hudson flows so quietly that its 
very motion seems part of the stillness. On a 
summer day the voyage which Irving made as 
a boy with kindling imagination can be made 
between dawn and sunset, and takes one through 

125 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

a valley in which it seems to be always afternoon. 
There is activity of many kinds on either bank 
and on the surface of the river, but in the spa- 
ciousness of stream and landscape the hum and 
stir are resolved into all-embracing silence, and 
the quietness of Sleepy Hollow broods over 
wooded shores, distant hills, and flowing water. 

The acquaintance with the Hudson made 
when Irving was a boy was renewed and deep- 
ened when he finally returned from Europe in 
1832, after an absence of seventeen years. New 
York had grown into what seemed to him a vast 
city ; a few years later he described it in a letter 
to a friend as a "great crowded metropolis . . . 
full of life, bustle, noise, show, and splendor, . . . 
one of the most racketing cities in the world." 
One wonders what he would think of the roar- 
ing vortex of life which the slow little town of 
the forties, when this description was written, 
has become in these times of rebuilding on a 
scale which would have appalled the magicians 
of " The Arabian Nights." 

Sunnyside was already old when he made it 
a retreat from the tumult of the city and began 
the process of enlargement which has adapted 

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the ancient house to modern needs without sacri- 
ficing its old-time charm. " My own place has 
never been so beautiful as at present," he wrote 
years later. " I have made more openings by 
pruning and cutting down trees, so that from 
the piazza I have several charming views of the 
Tappan Zee and the hills beyond, all set, as it 
were, in verdant frames; and I am never tired 
of sitting there in my old Voltaire chair, of a 
long summer morning, with a book in my hand, 
sometimes reading, sometimes musing, and 
sometimes dozing, and mixing up all in a plea- 
sant dream." A beautiful picture, surely, of 
the old age of a man of letters who continued 
the tradition of the ripeness of spirit, the medi- 
tative temper, geniality, and humor, which has 
never lapsed among the English-speaking 
peoples. 

In those years when the Albany stages were 
making their last trips and the mild thunder of 
the first railroad trains began to wake the echoes 
of the Highlands and disturb the slumbers of 
the Rip Van Winkles who have never been lack- 
ing in the old towns of Dutch origin, Irving was 
enriching the Hudson with literary and personal 

129 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

associations and making it a place of pilgrimage, 
but his own associations with it lay far back in 
his boyhood. In the later years it was the back- 
ground of his personal life ; in his early years it 
was the background of his life of imagination 
and sentiment, of his dawning consciousness of 
his gifts and his vocation, of his gentle and re- 
sponsive but essentially robust spirit. He lived 
at Sunnyside, he worshiped at Christ Church in 
the beautiful old village of Tarrytown, and he 
lies at rest in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery: these 
are the obvious associations of the man with the 
country which will long bear his name. To find 
his deeper and more vital connections with the 
Hudson valley one must go back to his youth, to 
his earlier books, to the heart of his work. Its 
beauty, always reposeful and in summer touched 
with elusive dreaminess, went home to his young 
imagination and reappeared again and again in 
charming description, in two legends which have 
taken their places among our classics, not only 
because of the charm of their form, but because 
they are penetrated with the very spirit of the 
region they portray, and in the quietness, the 
sensitiveness to old associations, the charity for 

130 



WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY 

that ease which the strenuous New England 
temper called by another name, the pervading 
humor which is never obtrusive or boisterous but 
is full of heart and fellowship, the happy blend- 
ing of dignity and graciousness, and the modu- 
lated cadence of English speech in his work. 

In the long future there may come a Hudson 
of new associations; a river freighted with the 
traffic of a valley which has become a continuous 
city from its mouth to the foothills of the Adi- 
rondacks. In that day some writer may appear 
whose work will echo the multitudinous voices 
of countless factories and the murmur of a vast 
population. But for many a year to come the 
Hudson which Hendrik explored as the herald 
of a host of sturdy Dutch settlers, the Hudson 
of long decades of slumberous plenty, of stately 
and humble homes — the Hudson of three cen- 
turies — will flow through Irving's country, and 
remain typical of his genius-; the background of 
his art and life. 



131 




o 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 




HE one hundred and fifty- 
fourth anniversary of the 
birth of Goethe, which fell 
on the 28th day of last Au- 
gust, found Weimar not only 
eager to honor the memory 
of the great poet who was 
for fifty-six years its best-known resident, and 
is likely to remain to the end of time its most 
illustrious citizen, but essentially unchanged 
since his death in 1832. Even in a quiet Ger- 
man town, off the great highways of travel, 
changes must come in seventy-one years ; and if 
Goethe were to step out of his old home to-day 
and walk to the grand-ducal palace, rebuilt in 
part under his own direction, he would doubtless 

137 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

come upon unfamiliar sights. But Weimar re- 
mains in essentials a town of the old time: 
quaint, thoroughly German, and rich in associa- 
tion, not only with great men, but with some 
of the earliest statements of the modern concep- 
tion of the relation of art to life. 

The little town is preeminently fitted to be 
the custodian of literary traditions. It has an 
old-time dignity of bearing, as if it had always 
been the mother of great spirits. The quiet Ilm, 
flowing through its domain, is sacredly guarded 
along its entire course on both shores by a charm- 
ing park ; the homes of the poets are piously re- 
garded; and there are worthy memorials of 
greatness in public places. The statue of Her- 
der, one of the purest and most penetrating of 
modern minds, stands in front of the Stadt- 
Kirche, and bears his favorite and very charac- 
teristic motto, Lichtj Liebe, Leben; in front of 
the theater Goethe and Schiller are commemo- 
rated in a noble group; the Grand Duke Au- 
gustus, in an equestrian statue, wears the laurel 
secured for him by the great spirits whom 
he had the sagacity to recognize and bring 
into his service; while Wieland is remembered 

138 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

in the fine salon which bears his name in the 
palace. 

One may spend many hours with profit in 
Goethe's house, now restored as nearly as pos- 
sible to the condition in which the poet left it: 
a fine house, notable chiefly for the range of in- 
terests expressed in the collections of several 
kinds which it contains, and for the evidence 
which it gives of the mingled dignity and sim- 
plicity of the poet's life — the first expressed in 
spacious rooms given over to pictures, busts, and 
memorials of great men, and the second dis- 
closed by the extreme plainness of the working- 
room, and the tiny chamber opening from it in 
which Goethe died. It is profitable to walk 
through the palace and study the elegant salons 
in which ' Goethe and Schiller are commemo- 
rated by mural scenes from their works, and 
then go directly to the simple little rooms, not 
far distant, in which the two poets died; or to 
enter the grand-ducal vault in the new cemetery 
and note the presence of wreaths and flowers on 
the coffins, not of princely rulers, but of the two 
poets, whose beautiful friendship finds here its 
final expression. 

139 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

Best of all, perhaps, is it to walk through the 
winding, shaded park, barely kept from wild- 
ness ; to come in a secluded place upon the coiled 
serpent in bronze which symbolized for Goethe 
the genius loci; to make one's way slowly to the 
garden house which Goethe loved so well, and 
in which he so often sought solitude and silence 
for his work, and to sit in the places which were 
dear to him. Never, surely, did a meditative 
spirit find more congenial surroundings than 
Goethe found in these green and fragrant 
places of peace. It is a piece of special good 
fortune to fall in, along those walks, as did the 
writer, with an old-time resident of Weimar 
who has grown up in its traditions and loves it 
for its poets, and to hear his eager, affectionate 
narrative of events and story of localities; and 
then to go into some secluded spot and ask one's 
self what there was in Goethe's career and ge- 
nius to justify the extraordinary interest which 
centers in him. 

The minor conditions in Goethe's life were 
unusually fortunate, for the poet was well born 
in every sense; his childhood had surroundings 
picturesque to the eye and full of suggestion to 

140 



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WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

the imagination ; he had exceptional educational 
opportunities, the best and most fruitful of them 
being his mother's genius for story-telling; he 
had perfect health and an impressive and win- 
ning personality; he never knew care in the or- 
dinary sense of the word, for he was all his 
life shielded from material uncertainty and 
anxiety, with work enough of the methodical 
kind to give him occupation and position, but 
not enough to diminish the energy of his intelli- 
gence or to destroy the freshness of his spirit. 
He had rank, station, friends, fame, and long 
life — all great and helpful aids to the unfolding 
and maturing of a great nature and the free flow 
outward of a great inward force. These pros- 
perous conditions were important, but they were, 
nevertheless, minor conditions; for they did not 
bear directly upon the impulse which a creative 
nature receives from rich material, from a stir- 
ring atmosphere, and from that searching ap- 
peal to the heart and the imagination made by 
a great people silent but full of spiritual eager- 
ness and restless with unexpressed thought and 
emotion. 

Homer spoke to a homogeneous race; Dante 
143 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

to a divided country, but to an Italian nature, 
alert, energetic, and proudly conscious of the 
possession of great qualities; Shakespeare to 
an England turbulent, ill-conditioned, and un- 
trained in the higher arts, but overflowing with 
unspent vitality, with a dawning national con- 
sciousness full of insolence, but full also of 
splendid possibilities of growth and achieve- 
ment. In Goethe's youth there was not only no 
Germany, but there was, in the deepest sense of 
the phrase, no German people. There was a 
multitude of petty States, but there was no 
nation; there were Prussians, Hanoverians, 
Saxons, Bavarians, Swabians, but there was, 
for the purposes of art, no German race. There 
was a country held together by geographical 
conditions, but split into fragments by political 
boundary lines; there was a race of common 
origin, but broken asunder by differences of 
religion, of history, temperament, and ideal; 
there was a language common to a large com- 
munity, but still to be enriched by the loving 
genius of great artists, who are constantly add- 
ing to the resources of speech no less than to 
those of thought. There had been true poets 
in Germany centuries before Goethe, and the 

1U 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

literature was rich in legend and tradition, in 
epic and song, but it is nevertheless true that 
there had been no great German literature. 
Goethe was the contemporary in his old age of 
Scott and Carlyle, but there was no Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, , Spenser, Milton, or Dryden be- 
hind him; there were in place of these the old 
Epic poets ; there were Hans Sachs, Klopstock, 
and Wieland. The significance of this state- 
ment lies in the fact that, although the German 
language was as old as the English, it had no 
great poets. It is true that Homer and Dante 
had no great predecessors, but each stood at the 
beginning of the real history of his race; 
Goethe, on the other hand, appeared at a late 
hour in that history, and found the literature still 
to be created, and the language still to be modu- 
lated to the finer uses of expression. Youth was 
past, both for the race and the people, but the 
works of youth were still to be accomplished 
and the fruits of youth were still to be borne. 

There were great figures in Germany while 
Goethe was a student at Leipsic and at Strass- 
burg; but Lessing, Herder, and Winckelmann 
were thinkers and critics of the creative temper 
rather than writers of the creative order and 

145 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

quality. The names of Bodmer and Gottsched, 
those wooden gods of a Germany in artistic and 
intellectual tutelage to France, bring before the 
mind by concrete illustration the aridity of 
spirit, the shallowness of insight, and the dead- 
ness of thought which reigned in Germany in 
the early years of Goethe's life. Never has a 
poet of the first rank fallen upon times more 
uninspiring and come to maturity among a peo- 
ple more divided. Both race and language were 
old, but they lacked the trained intelligence, the 
solidarity of experience, the unity of emotion 
and ideal, which are the finest fruits of maturity. 
From the very start Goethe was driven back 
upon himself and forced to undertake con- 
sciously and of set purpose the work which, un- 
der more inspiring conditions, would have been 
almost instinctive. For to speak simply and 
naturally, in good German speech out of a 
sound German heart, was, at the time " Gotz " 
appeared, to be a reformer and to lead a move- 
ment. Not only was the French influence to be 
destroyed and the French standards, methods, 
and tastes to be driven out, but a native taste 
was to be educated, and true racial forms of 

146 




The State Church at Weimar 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

expression were to be fashioned. Goethe was 
too self -centered, even in his youth, and of an 
intellectual fiber too vigorous, to come under the 
spell of the shallow foreign influence so widely 
prevalent. The French classicism, which drew 
its inspiration, not from the originative litera- 
ture of the Greeks, but from the derivative litera- 
ture of the Romans, had no charms for a nature 
so rich in original instincts and so strongly 
swayed by the free and living forces of the time. 
It was to the past of his own people that Goethe 
turned when he wrote, with a strong, vigorous 
hand, the virile and genuinely German drama 
of " Gotz von Berlichingen " ; it was the dis- 
eased and disordered fancy among his own Teu- 
tonic kin that he portrayed with such searching 
insight and power in the " Sorrows of Werther," 
And the storm of acclamation which swept Ger- 
many showed how powerfully the chords of ra- 
cial feeling had been struck and how clear was 
Goethe's insight into the German nature. It 
seemed as if a straight and easy road to fame 
and popularity lay before him ; for he had only 
to hold to Germanic subjects and to the broad, 
free, Romantic manner to deepen and confirm 

149 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

his hold upon a people who, although become 
both prosaic and sentimental, had not lost the 
German feeling, and understood a note struck 
out of chords long silent, but which had not 
lost the power of vibration. To Goethe, how- 
ever, with his extraordinary breadth of view, 
and his steadily deepening insight into the na- 
ture and functions of art, the situation was not 
so simple; it was, indeed, highly complex. He 
felt the loneliness of a man superior in gift and 
vision, not only to his contemporaries, but to his 
predecessors in his own field. Lessing had 
much to teach him in the way of clarification of 
sight; Herder opened up life on all sides by 
those luminous glances of his into the heart of 
things ; and without the education which he had 
from Winckelmann he could never have under- 
stood Italy and discerned the secret of antique 
art as he did in the impressionable years of 
his famous visit. Nevertheless, to a man of 
Goethe's power, there was the consciousness of 
creative possibilities as yet unrealized in the 
native literature, either past or present. If he 
had been a dramatist by the structure of his 
mind, there would have been successors to 

150 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

" Gotz " and " Egmont " ; but Goethe was a 
dramatist by intention rather than by nature, 
He was drawn away, by the immense range of 
his mind, from the definiteness and concreteness 
of the dramatic representation of life. He used 
the dramatic form many times, and with very 
great success ; but, except in the portrayal of two 
or three women, he does not convey the impres- 
sion of being compelled to use that form ; and in 
this connection we must recall his own words: 
" Talent may do what it will; genius does what 
it must." He could not find expression for the 
ideas that thronged about in a repetition of his 
earlier successes. When he came, however, to 
the question of other and ampler forms of ex- 
pression, he was confronted by the fact that he 
must create or introduce them. Neither the 
German language nor the German literature 
furnished them ready to his hand. Style in the 
true sense of the word was almost unknown in 
Germany. It was not until the publication of 
' Tasso " that Goethe's own style in its distinc- 
tion and perfection was discerned ; not until the 
appearance of " Hermann und Dorothea " that 
the rhythmic possibilities of the German lan- 

151 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

guage were revealed. Klopstock, Hermann 
Grimm tells us, was the creator of modern Ger- 
man prosody; he wrote the first true German 
odes, the first real German hexameters; but he 
became a mannerist, and he never was, at any 
period, a great writer. When " Hermann und 
Dorothea " appeared, Gleim declared that the 
lovely pastoral was a "sin against his holy 
Voss." The famous translation of Homer was 
a masterpiece, indeed, and delivered the Ger- 
man hexameter from its academic precision and 
artificiality, and gave it the freedom and move- 
ment of living speech. It was Goethe, however, 
who first touched this verse, so readily made 
sluggish and prosaic, with complete ease and 
skill, and made it so completely at home in Ger- 
man that it seems the native form of one of the 
most charming pastorals in any modern speech. 
All this and much more Goethe had to do 
to free his own mind and to effect that enlarge- 
ment of German literature which lay within his 
power. "Egmont," " Tasso," " Iphigenia," 
" Faust," were thronging about him in the early 
Weimar days; they filled his imagination, but 
he seemed incapable of working them out. A 

152 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

richer atmosphere was necessary; another stage 
in his development was inevitable. Out of the 
Germany of 1786, with its poverty of literary 
ait and its defective artistic instinct, Goethe 
passed into Italy, and came under the full power 
of that great art to which he had long been 
drawn, and with which he had so much in com- 
mon. Then came what has so often been re- 
garded as the break with his past ; as if the con- 
tinuity of a life were to be sought in its works 
rather than in itself! Whether wisely or un- 
wisely it is unnecessary to discuss here, the 
writer of the romantic temper and methods be- 
came a writer of classical temper and methods. 
To " Gotz " and " Werther " succeeded " Iphi- 
genia," " Tasso," and the "Roman Elegies"; 
and to the storm of applause which greeted the 
earlier pieces succeeded the silence of indiffer- 
ence or the murmurs of criticism. Goethe lost 
his audience, and did not completely regain it 
until the publication of the first part of 
" Faust " in 1808. He had not only discarded 
old forms and employed new ones, but he had 
wholly changed his attitude toward his work; 
he not only modeled that work freely on classical 

153 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

models, but he attempted to detach himself 
from it and remove it as definitely from all re- 
lation to his life as the works of Sophocles were 
freed from all trace of connection, except the 
inevitable local color and individual touch, with 
the dramatist's personal experience. From 
" Iphigenia," " Tasso," the " Roman Elegies," 
and from a number of shorter poems like " The 
Bride of Corinth" and "Alexis und Dora," 
Goethe endeavored to detach himself entirely 
and to give his work an objectivity as definite 
and complete as that of a Greek statue. He did 
not succeed, because his works are one and all 
rooted in his experience, and because the effort 
was out of date ; no modern man can do perfectly 
what Goethe attempted to do. "Iphigenia" is a 
very noble work, but when we search for the es- 
sential Goethe we do not look into " Iphigenia " 
or " Tasso " ; we look into the first part of 
" Faust "—the " Faust " of the Romantic, not 
the " Faust " of the classical, period. Thus 
there appears in the maturity of Goethe's years 
and genius a transformation which was re- 
garded at the time and is now regarded by many 
as a complete revolution in his aims and meth- 

154 




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WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

ods, indeed in his very nature; for it was not 
until his return to Weimar, after the two mo- 
mentous years in Italy, that the charge of cold- 
ness began to be heard. 

From any point of view, the change is strik- 
ing and of far-reaching influence, and could 
have been possible only in a man to whom his 
own country and time did not furnish all the 
means of expression he craved, and who was in 
the habit of a constant and connected meditation 
on his art and his life. A man of Goethe's 
years, intelligence, and self-command does not 
sever himself from his artistic past, break with 
his audience, and essay entirely new methods of 
creation without deep and prolonged thought. 
Goethe's conversion was rapidly accomplished 
in the genial Italian air, but it had been long 
in preparation. It is probable that no great 
writer ever searched his own nature more rigor- 
ously or reflected on the conditions and func- 
tions of art more exhaustively than Goethe did 
before and after the Italian visit. Every step 
away from the earlier standpoint was taken with 
deliberate intention and after maturest thought. 
The change was the product of a philosophy of 

157 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

art completely formulated in the poet's mind. 
For it is clear that Goethe was drawn away 
from the Gothic spirit and the Romantic man- 
ner, not by the charm which attaches to the clas- 
sical form, but by that spell which resides in the 
antique view of life and of art as its intimate 
and natural expression. Goethe was primarily 
an artist, with a lyrical note as clear, personal, 
and beguiling as any in literature; art was to 
him the one form which life took on that gave 
it harmony, unity, and coherence ; and he found 
in the antique ideals and atmosphere the condi- 
tions which made art, not sporadic and indi- 
vidual, but the constant and glorious witness of 
the beauty at the heart of all things. If he was 
mistaken, there was a noble element in his error; 
it was the mistake of an Olympian born in an 
age of Titanic unrest and struggle. 

In Goethe's nature, moreover, the spontane- 
ous element was always held in check or di- 
rected by the rationalizing element. The flow- 
ers of song often bloomed very rapidly under 
his hand, but in such cases there was always an 
antecedent preparation of the soil; the seeds 
were already germinating, and the urgence of 

158 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

some deeply felt experience or the genial 
warmth of some prosperous hour or event 
swiftly brought the blade to the light. He 
often wrote with great rapidity, but there was 
nothing in common between his methods and 
the methods of the great improvisers like Byron 
and Lope de Vega. The germinal idea of 
" Faust," he tells us, was suddenly unfolded to 
his imagination; but he spent sixty years in 
working it out! " The truth is," wrote Lowell 
to Mr. Fields, " my brain requires a long brood- 
ing-time before it can hatch anything. As soon 
as the life comes into the thing, it is quick 
enough in chipping the shell." With Goethe 
the process was not so much brooding over his 
theme as looking at it from many sides and put- 
ting it into different forms. During the first 
Weimar period, from 1776 to 1786, while he was 
so silent and apparently so absorbed in pleas- 
ures and administration, " Tasso," " Iphigenia," 
" Egmont," " Wilhelm Meister," and " Faust " 
possessed his imagination by turns. They had 
lodged there in those first prodigal years of his 
youth at Frankfort. He not only nourished 
and matured them by brooding meditation, but 

159 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

he gave them shape and form. While " Faust " 
and u Wilhelm Meister " received occasional 
touches, " Tasso," " Iphigenia," and " Eg- 
mont" were written out in forms which were 
afterward very largely or wholly discarded. 
So far as " Faust " was concerned, it was a kind 
of running commentary begun when the poet 
was a student and completed in his eighty-sec- 
ond year! Evidently, here was a singer whose 
gifts were from heaven, but whose methods of 
work were as deliberately thought out and his 
processes of creation as consciously ordered as 
if he had been a child of Mercury rather than 
of the Muses. In studying Goethe's genius 
one is constantly reminded of the free, sponta- 
neous, and buoyant temper of his mother; in 
studying his methods one is reminded of his 
precise, orderly, and prosaic father. 

There was a distinct vein of philosophic in- 
quiry running through Goethe's intellectual 
life, and there was a strong critical tendency 
in his nature. He was never an orderly thinker, 
but he was always striving to arrive at the unity 
of things, and to discover those central points 
at which the arts and sciences disclosed the iden- 

160 




PC 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

tity of their laws and the harmony of their meth- 
ods. He studied both Spinoza and Kant, not 
exhaustively, but intelligently; and while he 
resolutely confined his speculations within the 
horizons of time and space, he habitually con- 
cerned himself with the deeper relations of 
things, and especially with their relations of 
interdependence. He cared little for phenom- 
ena in themselves, although his attachment to 
the concrete in nature was so intense as seriously 
to impair the value of his methods of observa- 
tion; but he cared greatly for phenomena as 
they hinted at that interior unity which made 
them all manifestations of one force. His dis- 
covery of the intermaxillary bone and of the 
typical plant disclose the bent of his mind to- 
ward a comprehension of nature as a living 
whole. In spite of the large place which gener- 
alization holds in his work, Goethe was a poet 
with a philosophic bent rather than a philosopher 
with a poetic temper. In his old age the didac- 
tic mood predominated over the purely artistic, 
but even in the " Elective Affinities " there are 
passages of passionate intensity and power. 
The critical faculty, when it deals mainly 
163 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

with principles, as in Goethe's case, contains a 
distinct philosophical element; but its chief 
characteristic is its power to discern artistic 
values and to judge artistic processes. It 
is allied, therefore, with the creative rather 
than with the purely philosophic mind. Goethe 
is, on the whole, the greatest of literary crit- 
ics; indeed, his criticism has such insight and 
range that he may be called the greatest of 
art critics. No man has saicl so many and 
such luminous things about the artist and the 
creative mind and mood. A complete phi- 
losophy of art, in the widest sense of a much- 
abused word, lies in his work ; a philosophy not 
like that of Hegel, worked out from the his- 
torical standpoint, and with constant reference 
to its relations with the Absolute ; nor like that 
of Taine, elaborated from the psycho-physio- 
logical point of view; but slowly distilled from 
a prolonged artistic activity, and from first- 
hand acquaintance with the artistic nature. In 
this field, as in others, Goethe is fragmentary 
and defective in logical arrangement; because 
his conclusions were reached, not as steps in a 
formal process of thought, but as generaliza- 

164 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

tions from a growing experience. He does not 
discuss art with speculative interest; he speaks 
as one having authority, because he discerns 
the vital processes and relations of artistic pro- 
duction to the artist and to life. He values 
technical skill, and knows the secrets of crafts- 
manship; but he is concerned constantly with 
art in its fundamental relations with civilization 
and with individual experience, and he is in 
constant contact with the sources of its power 
and freshness. The distinctly judicial activity 
of the critical faculty is, nevertheless, always 
going on in him, and constantly betrays its pres- 
ence. So clearly, indeed, does he recognize the 
influence of the critical spirit in his own life, 
that he has more than once given it objective 
form, and Mephistopheles remains the great- 
est literary representative of the critical spirit 
divorced from the creative spirit and become, 
therefore, entirely negative and destructive. 

There is still another characteristic of Goethe 
which must be emphasized in connection with 
the rationalizing side of his nature, and that is 
the extraordinary intimacy of connection be- 
tween his works and his experience. All the 

165 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

greater works of Goethe, even those which, like 
" Iphigenia " and " Tasso," seem most detached 
from him, were bound up with experiences 
through which he had passed, or with persons 
whom he had known. The impression, more 
than once spread abroad, that he sought the 
deeper relations and the more intimate happen- 
ings of life for the sake of the literary material 
they supplied, is without foundation ; it is, in- 
deed, a misrepresentation of a man who, what- 
ever his faults, had a notable kindliness of spirit. 
If any criticism is to be made upon Goethe in 
this connection, it finds its justification rather 
in his studious avoidance of agitating experi- 
ences and disturbing relationships; so far was 
he from seeking subjects for the kind of vivi- 
section which has sometimes been charged 
against him. Nor is there a trace of artistic in- 
difference to individual suffering in his dealing 
with those relationships of his past in which 
others were concerned. What could be more 
delicately or tenderly recorded than the idyllic 
romance of his student days at Strassburg which 
has immortalized Frederika? When this lovely 
vision rose before his imagination years after- 

166 




The Garden of Goethe's House 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

ward, his secretary noted the agitation of the 
old man and the deep silence into which he fell. 
The disclosure of Goethe's experience in his 
work has nothing in common with the vulgar 
invasion of the sanctities of friendship and love 
of which he has sometimes been accused. There 
is no record of any light or purely professional 
use of burned-out passions for the purposes of 
art. Goethe rationalized his experience and 
gave it artistic expression from an inward and 
irresistible impulse ; it was the law of his nature, 
and its necessity as well, to meditate upon every- 
thing he had passed through, and to discern in 
it whatever was beautiful and permanent. No 
man ever kept a more complete record of his 
inward life, and outward events found place in 
that record because they influenced and affected 
his development. The calmness of his bearing 
in later years — and it is worth remembering 
that it is the old Goethe and not the nature or 
young Goethe whom the world recalls most 
vividly — cannot hide the tumults and agitations 
through which he passed, and his imagination 
kept long in painful touch with experiences 
which most men would have forgotten. He 

169 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

could rid himself of these haunting memories 
only by writing them out; when he had given 
them objective expression, they seemed to de- 
tach themselves from him. He did not seek ad- 
ventures of the heart and the soul; nor did he 
go about beating the bush for the poetic idea. 
He was as far as possible removed from the cold, 
impassive nature turning every emotion to ac- 
count and following rigidly and haughtily a 
plan of artistic activity through a long and sed- 
ulously guarded life. This is, or has been, the 
popular ideal of Goethe. It could not have been 
further from the truth if it had been the popular 
ideal of Schiller — that eager, restless, aspiring 
spirit whose life went out in one great breath 
of aspiration and work. 

What strikes one who reads the life of Goethe 
with insight is his capacity for suffering and 
his dependence on experience. He had, as an 
older man, a stiff manner inherited from his 
father, and he cultivated persistently calmness 
and repose of spirit because he regarded these 
qualities as conducive to the ripening of a man's 
nature, but he was terribly shaken by the sor- 
rows which from time to time knocked at the 

170 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

doors of his strong house. As for his artistic 
prevision, no great writer was ever more de- 
pendent for his material upon what life brought 
him. He did not forecast his creative activities 
and give them studied direction; he waited upon 
life, and he was powerless to create until life, 
speaking through experience, gave him some- 
thing to say and the impulse to say it. The work 
of no other poet reveals a relation so close and 
constant with the happenings, events, and in- 
ward activities of his own history. Beginning 
with the " Sorrows of Werther," it is possible 
to connect almost every character in Goethe's 
books with himself or with some one whom he 
had known; every incident with some episode 
in his own story or the story of his friends ; al- 
most every experience described or illustrated 
with some actual experience accessible to him. 
The history of his loves, his friendships, his jour- 
neys, his studies, lies beyond the touch of time 
in the long record of his dramas, poems, novels, 
autobiography. His works taken as a whole 
constitute, as he himself declared, one great con- 
fession. Nothing is concealed and very little 
is extenuated. The truth comes out from begin- 

171 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

ning to end, and the man's limitations are as 
evident as his strength. These works fit his 
vital history like a robe woven of the substance 
of that which it clothes. Ideas came to him by 
the way of the heart rather than of the head; 
and they did not come until he was ripe for 
them. With all his gifts, he could not have 
projected into thin air those vast and irides- 
cent dreams of Shelley; he had to keep in con- 
stant touch with reality. When he pushed sym- 
bolism beyond the limits of his own personal 
contact with life, as he did in the second part 
of " Faust," he did not cease to be interesting, 
but he did cease to be inspired. Among all his 
beautiful lyrics, unsurpassed in their sponta- 
neity and freshness of feeling and their winged 
melody, there is barely one which is not known 
to have risen out of some deep emotion. In 
works of apparently impersonal character he 
often speaks most directly out of his heart. In 
" Tasso " he invests Ferrara with surpassing 
charm, but he is thinking of Weimar. Every 
poem and play is a chapter in his biography. 
He did not seek the materials for artistic activ- 
ity; they sought him. He did not live for art; 

172 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

he lived in and through art. Art was his natural 
form of expression, and expression was the ne- 
cessity of his nature, as it is of all rich and 
healthy natures. Through this long-sustained 
expression there ran a vein of fresh, spon- 
taneous thought and feeling; but so great and 
rich a harvest could not have been reaped save 
by a deep reflection upon the significance of 
these outward happenings. Goethe realized his 
experience and made it clear and intelligible 
by meditation. 

It will be seen, therefore, that the poet's 
method of production emphasized the rational- 
izing tendencies in his nature which have been 
indicated, and that the times upon which he was 
cast, the natural bent of his mind, his strong 
critical instinct, and the dependence of his ac- 
tivity upon his experience, developed and deep- 
ened his rationalizing faculty. The crowning 
evidence of the influence of the rationalizing 
faculty upon his inward life and upon his ar- 
tistic activity is to be found in the definiteness 
of his aims and methods. From a compara- 
tively early period he had determined to make 
the most of life by intelligent regulation of his 

173 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

habits, occupations, and gifts in the interest of 
complete self -development. Most men take 
what opportunity offers them and wait on 
events without understanding them. Goethe 
resolved to convert all experience into one great 
opportunity. " From my boyhood," says Wil- 
helm Meister, " it has been my wish and purpose 
to develop completely all that is in me, ... to 
make my own existence harmonious. " In other 
words, Goethe made a deliberate plan to live his 
life in his own way and for certain definite ends. 
" The desire to rear as high as possible in the 
air the pyramid of my existence, of which the 
base is given and placed for me, predominates 
over every other, and scarcely allows itself for a 
moment to be forgotten." These words, spoken 
by a man under thirty, were still descriptive 
of the same man when, at eighty-three, death 
came to interrupt for the first time habits of 
work and of thought resolutely pursued for a 
full half -century. Whatever judgment we may 
form concerning this plan of life, it is certainly 
true that it was a plan as deliberately thought 
out and as resolutely worked out as any of those 
practical experiments in life by which some of 

174 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

the most sincere Greek thinkers evidenced their 
faith in the reality of philosophy. 

From many points of view, therefore, the 
nature and mind of Goethe disclose the philo- 
sophical as distinctly as the creative faculty, the 
critical as well as the artistic temper, and the ra- 
tionalizing no less than the spontaneous impulse. 
In this union of qualities always dissimilar and 
sometimes antagonistic is found the difficulty 
of clearly understanding and wisely judging 
this many-sided man; in this unusual combina- 
tion is discoverable that element in his work 
which has made him one of the greatest teachers 
of all time and one of the foremost intellectual 
forces of modern times; and in this same com- 
bination is to be found the secret of his occa- 
sional artistic weakness — a weakness upon 
which Wordsworth put his hand when he said 
that Goethe's work is not inevitable enough. 
Calculation and intention are sometimes in the 
ascendant, as in the second part of " Faust" ; and 
the spontaneous flow of imagination is neither 
swift nor deep enough to drain into one current 
the multitudinous streams which rise over so vast 
a territory of knowledge and thought. 

177 



WEIMAR AND GOETHE 

This rationalizing element runs through all 
Goethe's work, and gives it a structure of 
thought of singular massiveness and strength. 
There is the closest relation between his work 
and his view or philosophy of life. His artistic 
impulse, in all his larger work, moved in entire 
harmony with, and often under the direction of, 
his rationalizing faculty. He is distinctively 
the teacher among creative writers ; the man who 
aims not merely at the free expression of his 
own nature and the creation of beautiful literary 
forms, but also at definite exposition, through 
the medium of art, of certain general views. 
This could hardly have been otherwise in one 
who held so serious a view of art, and to whom 
it was of such supreme importance as the final 
expression of the mind and heart of man. For 
with Goethe, as with all the greater artists, life 
is primary and art secondary in the order of 
time ; but both are parts of one complete expres- 
sion of the soul. In Goethe's case, however, this 
process of thought is more definitely marked 
than in the case of any of his peers ; and it was 
probably more self-conscious and self -directed. 



178 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 




HE artistic value of back- 
grounds is strikingly shown 
in Mr. Blackmore's one 
successful novel, " Lorna 
Doone." There are other 
stories of his which are not 
without charming qualities, 
but on this romance alone has he put the stamp 
of beauty and individuality. " Lorna Doone " 
cannot be regarded as a great story; it is, rather, 
a lovable story — one of those pieces of art that 
live by reason of their close touch upon the most 
intimate and tender of human relations ; a story 
which, upon analysis, reveals serious faults of 
construction and defects of style, but which no- 
body is willing to analyze. It is too long; it 

183 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

drags in places ; the manner, under the guise of 
great simplicity, is sometimes artificial; and yet 
it captivates, and its charm is likely to abide. 

That charm resides in two elements — its 
idyllic love story, and its impressive back- 
ground. If the drama of John Kidd and 
Lorna Doone had been played on a common- 
place stage, it could hardly have appealed with 
such beguiling force to the imagination; it is 
because through it, as through an open window, 
we are always looking out on the wild, romantic 
Valley of the Doones that it lives in memory 
and recalls us to many a quiet re-reading. To 
a Devonshire man, as Blackmore reports with 
evident satisfaction, " Lorna Doone " is " as 
good as clotted cream," that delicious product 
of the dairies of Devon. It is redolent of 
Devon and Somerset, two counties which in va- 
riety and richness of scenery must be ranked 
among the first in England. John Ridd be- 
longed to both counties, and both have given the 
story the charm of landscapes of noble breadth 
and ripest beauty. 

There is no better approach to the Valley of 
the Doones than a drive across country from 

184. 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

Bideford. At nightfall, in that quaint old 
town, one may look across the Torridge and see 
the lights shining from the low windows of 
" The Ship Tavern," where Salvation Yeo and 
his fellows once talked far into the night of the 
perils of the Spanish Main. One may, if he 
chooses, sit in the room in which much of the 
work of preparation for the writing of " West- 
ward Ho " was done. On a soft summer morn- 
ing, the low sky veiled with a pale mist, no road 
could be more beguiling than that which takes 
one from the old seaport, where famous sailors 
were bred in the sixteenth century, into the 
heart of the lovely Devonshire landscape, with 
its bold lines of hills, its rich verdure, its fields 
ripe with the deep-rooted loveliness of ancient 
fertility, its hedges so high that one is often shut 
in between impenetrable walls of hawthorn and 
privet. 

For hours through this quiet world of old- 
time beauty one drives in absolute solitude; not 
even a cart comes down the long hills or around 
the winding curves of the road. Later, as one 
nears Lynton, coaches will thunder past; but 
across country this western corner of England 

185 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

is as quiet as it was in the days before tele- 
phones vexed the ear with the noise of distant 
cities. In some corner of a field or some bend 
in the road, under immemorial oaks or beeches, 
there is fitting time for luncheon and a quiet 
nooning for the horses. If there happens to be 
a long hill ahead, one walks on in advance, stop- 
ping now and again to enter some newly har- 
vested field and catch another glimpse of the 
fertile landscape where long service of human 
needs has bred a deep sense of fellowship be- 
tween man and meadow. In one of these little 
incursions one may meet a typical English 
farmer, taking time for a turn with his pipe and 
predisposed to friendly talk, with a vein of 
characteristic criticism of the Government, the 
state of agriculture, and the English system in 
general; for farmers are much the same the 
world over, and are rarely without good-hu- 
mored grievances against existing conditions. 

At the end of the afternoon the landscape 
changes, and one comes out upon Exmoor, with 
its broad expanse of gently sloping moor, 
brown or green, with touches of purple bell- 
heather. The noble coast lies but a mile or two 

186 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

beyond ; and there again the landscape changes, 
and the cliffs of Devon stand in the sea, rocky 
and castellated or green to the very edges where 
the tides rise and fall. 

It is a noble approach which one makes who 
goes to the Valley of the Doones from Lynton ; 
at once wild, solitary, and beautiful with the 
loveliness of color, of moving streams, and of 
bold hillsides. There are passes between the 
hills so deep and densely overhung with trees 
that it is easy to imagine the sudden descent of 
the robber band from the hills, the brief strug- 
gle, and the swift success of the adventure. 
Below the road runs the stream which is fed by 
the two brooks which flow together at Waters- 
meet. The meeting of these mountain brooks 
is a place of rare beauty, where Bryant would 
have found the charm of solitude which laid its 
spell upon him in Flora's Glen among the 
Berkshires, with an added wildness of hill and 
an added loveliness of ancient water flowing 
through moss-grown beds. There is a choice of 
roads, and the well-informed go in by one route 
and return by another. The road through the 
valley of the Brendon runs through the quaint 

187 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

hamlet which bears the name of the stream; the 
little villages are much alike: a church, a par- 
sonage, a few laborers' houses, a small inn, and 
sometimes a picturesque house of size, solidity, 
and an air of assured position. 

The little hamlet of Oare is one of the focal 
points in the story, and there still stands the old 
church in which Lorna and John were married, 
where the true-hearted girl fell into the arms of 
the faithful lover, and from which John rushed 
in a mad passion and heartbreak to settle the 
long score with Carver Doone. It is a tiny 
building, well hidden by trees, with a low 
square tower, a nave so small that it seems like 
a toy structure, and a chancel as tiny; one of 
those quaint little churches which one finds in 
England, with room for but a handful of peo- 
ple, but touched with old associations and giv- 
ing a quiet landscape a hint of ancient worship 
and half -forgotten history. In this church John 
Ridd held office as warden with a deep sense 
of his unfitness. 

The Plover's Barrows Farm of John Ridd's 
time has vanished, but its site is pointed out, and 
one needs no imagination to look upon the land- 

188 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

scape through his eyes: "Almost everybody 
knows, in our part of the world at least, how 
pleasant and soft the fall of the land is round 
Plover's Barrows Farm. Above it is strong 
dark mountains, spread with heath, and deso- 
late, but near our house the valleys cove, and 
open warmth and shelter. Here are trees, and 
bright green grass, and orchards full of con- 
tentment, and a man scarce espy the brook, al- 
though he hears it everywhere, and, indeed, a 
stout good piece of it comes through our farm- 
yard, and swells sometimes to a rush of waves, 
when the clouds are on the hilltops. But all 
below, where the valley bends, and the Lyn 
stream goes along with it, pretty meadows slope 
their breast, and the sun spreads on the water." 
Here lived the Ridds — slow-witted, big-framed, 
honest-hearted farmer folk; loving the soil 
which they had worked for generations; clean- 
handed, God-fearing men and women of the 
stock which has given England an immovable 
foundation. 

The Bags worthy Valley lies a mile or more 
beyond, and here, at Bagsworthy Farm, one 
leaves the road and follows a footpath along the 

189 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

stream for three miles, through the haunts and 
home of the Doones. It is a beautiful glen, 
with a certain wildness and brooding desolation 
quite in keeping with its associations; but it is 
less bold and its sides are less precipitous than 
the descriptions in " Lorna Doone " suggest. 
The hillsides are steep and barren save for the 
bell-heather which softens their outlines, and 
the narrow valley has an atmosphere of remote- 
ness and desolation. The waterslide, when it is 
reached, seems much less alarming than it ap- 
peared to John Kidd when he made his perilous 
ascent; and the Doone Gate is a rocky mound 
which is easily accessible. 

It must not be forgotten that John Ridd's 
imagination was filled for years with an almost 
superstitious dread of the Doones, whose reck- 
lessness, audacity, quick intelligence, and long 
defiance of law had deeply impressed the whole 
countryside with a sense of terror, so that the 
Doone Valley became an accursed place, full 
of all manner of known or unimaginable ter- 
rors. Moreover, it is more than two centuries 
since the spell of the Doones was broken and 
their nest burned over their heads, and every 

190 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

year in that long period has softened and sub- 
dued their old haunt. The Exmoor of to-day- 
is a very different landscape from that upon 
which men looked in the time when Judge Jef- 
freys was holding the " bloody assizes." A cen- 
tury later Exmoor was " a land of freedom 
and solitude, haunt of the bittern and red deer, 
intersected by many a silent tomb and brawling 
river." The red deer are still there, and the 
wild, lonely beauty of the heaths and of the 
Valley of the Doones is untouched ; but Mother 
Melldrum no longer hides in the Valley of the 
Rocks, the old superstitions have become pleas- 
ant legends for the entertainment of tourists, 
the Doones have ceased to be terrible and be- 
come romantic, and their valley has exchanged 
its inaccessible savagery for a wild loveliness 
which is somewhat secluded but quite within 
reach of the pedestrian. In the novel we see 
through John Ridd's eyes; and, honest and lit- 
eral as the slow-thinking but stout-hearted lover 
of Lorna was, his imagination was not un- 
touched by the wild tales and superstitious fears 
of his time. 

Coming out of this lonely valley, with its 
191 



THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 

tragic legend of ancient wrong rudely avenged, 
and its tender story of old-time love transmuted 
into lifelong happiness, one is prepared for the 
noble drive across the summits of the hills, splen- 
did beyond words with the purple of the bell- 
heather, mile upon mile of unbroken color 
against the sky, with long contrasts of yellow 
gorse; the great cliffs green or bare to the 
water, and the sea softly blue in the long sum- 
mer twilight; a noble country, molded on large 
lines, with a richness of verdure which has its 
roots in unnumbered centuries; lonely heaths, 
great hills shouldering one another to the line 
of the sky, and a valley sacred to the memory of 
a beautiful romance and of a novelist who 
touched the heart of his generation. 



192 




j 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 




T the funeral of William 
Cullen Bryant the most con- 
spicuous figure was Walt 
Whitman. Ear apart as the 
two men were in educa- 
tion, association, ideas, and 
methods of art, there was one 
striking resemblance between them: they were 
both elemental poets dealing with a few funda- 
mental things. Bryant's range was narrow, 
but the vastness of nature in the New World 
came into view for the first time in his verse; 
and what he lacked in breadth was supplied, in 
part at least, by his altitude of thought. In 
Whitman's verse, on the other hand, the sense 
of space is pervasive ; it is all out-of-doors ; from 

19T 



AMERICA IN WHITMANS POETRY 

every point the horizons are visible. One misses 
the heights of spiritual vision, the power and 
joy in moral achievement; but one feels the 
presence, in an original and powerful way, of 
the most inclusive human sympathy, the most 
sincere human fellowship. 

In the same year Whitman spoke on Lincoln 
to a small audience in a New York theater, made 
up largely of men and women interested in lit- 
erature. The poet was then in his sixtieth year, 
but looked much older: a large, impressive fig- 
ure, lacking muscular force and conveying no 
impression of physical strength, but massive, 
benignant, with a certain dignity of bulk and 
carriage. A gray suit, carelessly worn but ad- 
mirably harmonized with the head and frame, 
suggested that the poet had not wholly lost the 
self -consciousness with which he began his ca- 
reer as the founder of a new school of song. 
His face was large, kindly, and warmly tinted ; 
his head nobly set off by flowing white hair ; his 
bearing toward his audience free, cordial, and 
unaffected. He read his prose as he wrote it, 
with frequent parentheses, pauses, asides, ex- 
cursions into neighboring subjects; but his man- 

198 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

ner had flavor, individuality, native quality. 
At the close he recited " O Captain! My Cap- 
tain! " with such simplicity and depth of feeling 
that his audience felt that they were hearing the 
noblest man of the heroic age celebrated by its 
most rugged and powerful bard. 

The appearance of Whitman, the shape of 
his head, the detachment of his life, the dithy- 
rambic quality of his verse and its irregular and 
uncertain flow, the richness of his lyrical im- 
pulse and the uncertainty of his judgment, the 
broad, elemental conception of life and art 
which he held — all these things suggest the bard, 
the rhapsodical singer of a simple society and 
an objective age, rather than the many-sided in- 
terpreter in song of the rich complexity of mod- 
ern life. A primitive person Whitman was in 
many ways; and he shared with the skalds, 
bards, and prophets of earlier and less sophisti- 
cated races much of their affluence and sponta- 
neity of expression, their rejection of the subtle- 
ties and refinements of art; but he was in more 
respects the most modern of poets. In his con- 
ception of society, of the place and dignity of 
the individual, of the worth and beauty of the 

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AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

body and all its functions, in his use of forms 
of poetic expression, in his hearty acceptance 
of science, he marks the extreme reaction against 
the classical, the mediaeval, the aristocratic, the 
aesthetic ideals of the past. 

In his rejection of the accepted verse-forms 
he imagined himself creating a new poetic lan- 
guage vitally adapted to the expression of a 
new poetic thought; while, as a matter of fact, 
he was reviving and remodeling some of the 
oldest verse-forms. No man, however radical 
in instinct and intention, ever really breaks away 
from his race and creates new things out of hand. 
The race is far greater in its collective genius 
and experience than any individual member, 
and the most original man must be content to 
give some ancient divination a clearer statement, 
to touch some old experience with fresh feeling, 
to open a vista, to set the feet of men again on 
a path which their fathers once trod, but which 
they left for some other and more inviting road. 
Whitman revives, in his underlying thought, 
one of the oldest Oriental conceptions of the 
order and significance of life ; in his verse-forms 
he restores and gives contemporary currency 

200 



AMERICA EST WHITMAN'S POETRY 

to ancient methods of versification. These ele- 
ments in his work, which were loudly acclaimed 
as novel, are of a hoary antiquity; what is new 
and significant in him is his resolute acceptance 
of the democratic order in all its logical se- 
quences, his instinctive and sane feeling that if 
great poetry is to be written on this continent it 
must find its themes, not in the interests of the 
few, but in the occupation and experience of the 
many ; above all, he brought to his work a vital, 
searching, pictorial imagination of great com- 
pass and power of illumination. 

There is much that is repellent in his work; 
much that is coarse, gross, offensively and pe- 
dantically lacking in reticence, in regard for the 
sanctities of the body and of the relations be- 
tween men and women, which the ascetic and the 
sensualist have alike misunderstood and misin- 
terpreted. There is much in his egotism, his 
aggressive and ill-timed assertion of himself; 
there has been much, too, in the ill-advised and 
unintelligent advocacy of some of his devotees, 
that have combined to keep sane readers at a 
distance. These advocates have too often taken 
the attitude toward other American poets that 

201 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

some missionaries have taken toward the gods 
of the countries in which they have taught a new 
faith; they have sent them all to perdition to- 
gether. Students of literary history are too 
familiar with mutations of taste to be affected 
by the claims of exclusive originality in any 
poet. They are not disturbed about the security 
of Shakespeare and Milton, and they are at 
ease about the survival of Emerson and Poe. 
They are ready to accept the new, but they do 
not intend to reject the old; for the old that 
survives is always new. They have seen the ir- 
ruptions of the barbarians before, and have 
heard the crash of the falling gods; and they 
have lived to see the destroyers not only replac- 
ing the gods, but striving with pathetic eager- 
ness to recall the vanished skill which long ago 
imparted the touch of divinity. The new artist 
succeeds by the new illustration of that creative 
power which bears in every age immortal fruit. 
If Whitman is to be accepted as a poetic force 
of high authority, it will not be by dethroning 
his predecessors, but by establishing his right to 
reign with them. 

The real contribution made by Whitman to 
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Old Well at Huntington 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

American literature is the marvelously vivid 
picture of a democratic society in its workaday 
aspects, its primal and basal instincts, emotions, 
occupations. In a very real, though not in an 
exclusive or ultimate, sense he is the poet of de- 
mocracy; that, as Professor Dowden and other 
discerning critics beyond the sea saw when his 
work first came into their hands, is his funda- 
mental significance, his original quality. In 
his case, therefore, the background of his poetry 
is one of its formative elements ; it furnished the 
material with which he worked. 

That man is fortunately born the conditions 
of whose early life put him and keep him in in- 
timate and vital relation with the kind of ex- 
perience, the social habits and circumstances, 
with which he is later to deal with original in- 
sight and power. Whitman was born in a 
place that gave easy access to open fields, to the 
sea, and to great cities, and in a condition that 
brought him into contact with working America. 
He and Lanier are the only American poets of 
high rank who have been born out of New Eng- 
land ; and there is in them both a quality of im- 
agination which no other American poets pos- 

205 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

sess. In neither was there that balance between 
inspiration and achievement, that equality of in- 
sight with expression, which the greatest singers 
possess, but both disclosed an affluent and plastic 
imagination of a new order in this country. 
Two men could hardly have been further apart 
in education, ideal, character; but they are the 
two great figures in the opening of the National 
period which followed the close of the Civil 
War; and a century hence, when American lite- 
rature shall have struck deep into the almost 
unexplored depths of American life, their sig- 
nificance will be very great. 

Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Isl- 
and, on May 31, 1819. Dutch and English 
blood was in his veins, and he was the child of 
working people, farmers, mechanics; men and 
women who used their hands as well as their 
brains. On the father's side there was a strain 
of sluggishness in the blood, but with latent im- 
petuosity and vehemence of feeling and action 
on occasion. The Quaker tradition had ceased 
to affect the dress and speech of the family, but 
it bore its fruit in a fundamental faith in indi- 
vidual guidance and in a free but reverential 
attitude toward religion. 

206 



AMERICA IN WHITMANS POETRY 

The elder Whitman had been a carpenter, 
but during his residence in West Hills was a 
builder of excellent reputation for skill and 
thoroughness. The poet's mother was a large, 
quiet, strong woman, with little education, but 
of a deep nature ; " benignant, calm, practical, 
spiritual " are the adjectives with which her son 
described her. The house in which Walt Whit- 
man was born, which is still standing, was al- 
ready a century old at his birth, and the farm 
had been in possession of the family for three 
generations — a period long enough, as these 
things are reckoned in England, to make a 
" county family." 

" The Whitmans, at the beginning of the 
present century," writes Mr. Burroughs, " lived 
in a long, story-and-a-half farm-house, hugely 
timbered, which is still standing. A great 
smoke-canopied kitchen, with vast hearth and 
chimney, formed one end of the house. The 
existence of slavery in New York at that time, 
and the possession by the family of some twelve 
or fifteen slaves, house and field servants, gave 
things quite a patriarchal look. The very young 
darkies could be seen, a swarm of them, toward 
sundown, in this kitchen, squatted in a circle 

207 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

on the floor, eating their supper of Indian pud- 
ding and milk. In the house, and in food and 
furniture, all was rude but substantial. No 
carpets or stoves were known, and no coffee and 
tea, and sugar only for the women. Rousing 
wood fires gave both warmth and light on win- 
ter nights. Pork, poultry, beef, and all the or- 
dinary vegetables and grains were plentiful. 
Cider was the men's common drink, and used at 
meals. The clothes were mainly homespun. 
Journeys were made by both men and women 
on horseback. Both sexes labored with their 
own hands — the men on the farm, the women 
in the house and around it. Books were scarce. 
The annual copy of the almanac was a treat, 
and was pored over through the long winter 
evenings. I must not forget to mention that 
both these families were near enough to the sea 
to behold it from the high places, and to hear in 
still hours the roar of the surf ; the latter, after 
a storm, giving a peculiar sound at night. Then 
all hands, male and female, went down fre- 
quently on beach and bathing parties, and the 
men on practical expeditions for cutting salt 
hay, and for clamming and fishing." 

208 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

A county family in the English sense the 
Whitmans were not; but they had stayed long 
enough in one place, and been long enough en- 
gaged in work, to take root in the soil and to 
disclose the influence of long-continued tasks on 
a succession of workers. The Whitmans were 
large, plain, simple people, who possessed the 
elemental things of life and cared for little else ; 
they showed no marked intellectual aptitudes; 
no passion for education appeared in any gene- 
ration; they were industrious, capable working 
people, curiously devoid, it would seem, of the 
American ambition to " get on " in life. 

As a boy at West Hills, and later in Brook- 
lyn, Walt Whitman showed the out-of-doors 
habit that was characteristic of the family, and 
spent many profitable days not only in explor- 
ing the western end of Long Island from the 
Sound to the ocean, but in letting the atmo- 
sphere of the woods and fields envelop and color 
his imagination. He was then, as later, a loi- 
terer ; a habit of mind and body that made him 
not only tolerant of " loafers," but disposed to 
regard " loafing " as a dignified occupation. 
The trouble with most " loafing " is that it is 

209 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

unaccompanied with an invitation to the soul, 
to recall Whitman's phrase, to be at ease in 
the world and share its growth while the body 
is quiescent. 

There was some attendance on the public 
schools, but at thirteen the future poet went 
into a lawyer's office; then turned his attention 
to medicine; became a printer; taught country 
schools; wrote for the country newspapers; es- 
tablished a journal of his own; passed the years 
from 1840 to 1845 in New York as a compositor 
in printing-offices, spending his summers in the 
country and working on the farm; writing es- 
says and tales. In 1842 he published " Frank- 
lin Evans; or, The Inebriate: A Tale of the 
Times," dedicated to the Temperance Societies. 
This story has, fortunately, disappeared; its 
chief characteristics, according to the report of 
two of the poet's biographers, were " its flam- 
boyant phrase " and " its puritan odor of sanc- 
tity." Whitman's later work did not entirely 
escape the first of these qualities ; of the second 
not a trace remained. This stage of his life 
closed with two years of editorial work on the 
Brooklyn "Eagle." In 1848, in his thirtieth 

210 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY, 

year, he made a long journey through the Mid- 
dle, Southern, and Western States, ending with 
a visit of some length in New Orleans, where he 
became intensely interested in the picturesque 
and significant aspects of Southern life. He 
returned to Brooklyn and to journalism, and 
finally engaged for a time in building and sell- 
ing houses in that city. In 1855 " Leaves of 
Grass " appeared, and his life entered on an 
entirely different stage. 

The years at West Hills, in Brooklyn and 
New York, and the time given to travel, con- 
stitute the educational period in Whitman's life ; 
and while he was entirely familiar with some 
great formative books and deeply influenced 
by them, he was trained for his work out-of- 
doors. Few men have known so many kinds 
of people and been so much at home with men 
simply as men. Whitman had a passion for hu- 
manity, without reference to character, educa- 
tion, occupation, condition. The streets, ferry- 
boats, tops of stages, loafing-places, were dear 
to him because they gave him a chance to see 
men and women in the whole range of the con- 
ditions and accidents of life. 

211 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

He drew no lines and made no distinctions; 
the saint and the sinner, the nun and the pros- 
titute, the hero and the criminal, were alike to 
him in their fundamental appeal to his in- 
terest. He went to the churches, the great re- 
form meetings, the best theaters; and he went 
also to hospitals, poorhouses, prisons. He had 
friends among cultivated people, but he loved 
the native qualities of humanity, and was most 
at home with working people — pilots, masons, 
teamsters, deck-hands, mechanics of all sorts; 
men who toil, as his ancestors had toiled, with 
the hands. He went wherever people were to 
be found, and spent a great deal of time in the 
streets and at popular resorts of every kind. 
"He made himself familiar with all kinds of em- 
ployments," writes Dr. Bucke, " not by read- 
ing trade reports and statistics, but by watching 
and stopping hours with the workmen (often 
his intimate friends) at their work. He visited 
the foundries, shops, rolling-mills, slaughter- 
houses, woolen and cotton factories, ship-yards, 
wharves, and the big carriage and cabinet shops ; 
went to clam-bakes, races, auctions, weddings, 
sailing and bathing parties, christenings, and all 

212 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

kinds of merrymakings. He knew every New 
York omnibus-driver, and found them both 
good comrades and capital materials for study. 
Indeed, he tells us that the influence of these 
rough, good-hearted fellows (like the Broad- 
way stage-driver in ' To Think of Time ') un- 
doubtedly entered into the gestation of ' Leaves 
of Grass.' No scene of natural beauty, no ' ap- 
ple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchard/ 
no lilac-bush ' with every leaf a miracle,' no 
' gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, ex- 
panding the air,' no ' hurrying-tumbling waves,' 
no * healthy uplands, with herby-perf umed 
breezes,' give him greater inspiration than the 
thronged streets of New York, with the ' inter- 
minable eyes,' with the life of the theater, bar- 
room, huge hotel, the saloon of the steamer, 
the crowded excursion, ' Manhattan crowds, 
with their turbulent musical chorus,' the rush- 
ing torrent, the never-ceasing roar, of modern 
human life." He was no stranger, however, 
in libraries and museums, and his walks afield 
were long and fruitful. With his knapsack, a 
bit of luncheon, a copy of Shakespeare or Ho- 
mer, he spent long solitary days on the sea-shore, 

213 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

often reciting aloud like the older bards whose 
lineal descendant he was. He was sensitive to 
music, and the opera gave him unqualified de- 
light. He described the once famous contralto 
Alboni as " the blooming mother, sister of lofti- 
est Gods." He knew Wagner's music only by 
report, but that he divined something of its sig- 
nificance is evident from his remark: " I know 
from the way you fellows talk of it that the 
music of Wagner is the music of the ' Leaves.' ' 
So far Whitman had seen life chiefly and by 
choice in its fundamental occupations, its sim- 
plest aspects ; he was now to see it on the tragic 
side, and to be profoundly touched and influ- 
enced by it. In the second year of the Civil 
War he went to Washington and became a vol- 
unteer nurse in the army hospitals, supporting 
himself by writing letters to the New York 
" Times." At the close of the war he became 
a clerk in the Interior Department, a position 
from which he was unwisely removed because 
of certain passages in the " Leaves of Grass." 
Later he obtained a place in the Treasury De- 
partment, which he retained until 1873, when 
he was partially disabled by a slight stroke of 

214 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

paralysis. In the spring of that year he re- 
moved to Camden, N. J., where he had a modest 
home and saw many friends. His means were 
very limited, but they were supplemented by the 
devotion of his friends. His health was much 
impaired, but his cheerfulness was unclouded. 
There, on the 26th of March, 1892, he died, and 
lies buried in a Camden cemetery. 

Against the background of childhood, youth, 
and the years of active and of reflective life, 
sketched in the simplest lines, Whitman stands 
out with great distinctness and in striking con- 
trast with his peers among American men of 
letters. With one exception, they were univer- 
sity-bred men, born into the gentlest and best 
social traditions, within reach of the ripest in- 
tellectual influences, in touch with the finest 
expressions of the human spirit in its long 
historic unfolding. Whitman's heritage was 
of a different kind ; the influences which touched 
him immediately and most powerfully issued 
out of contemporaneous life; he knew a few 
books well, and they were among the great- 
est — the Bible, Homer in translation, Shake- 
speare, Don Quixote; he read Hegel, Tenny- 

215 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

son, Emerson, Carlyle, and other typical modern 
writers; but he found his material and his in- 
spiration in the America which he saw with his 
eyes, touched with his hand, and divined with 
his heart — the America of active life, of co- 
lossal energy, of native manliness, of free, 
unconventional, friendly living. This America 
of the farm, the workshop, the railroad, the 
prairie, the mining camp, the rushing, tumultu- 
ous play of elemental forces, he saw with a clear- 
ness of vision that no other poet has possessed, 
and described with a freshness and boldness of 
phrase that give incontrovertible evidence of real 
poetic power. This physical and social America 
is the background of his poetry ; and in making 
it his background Whitman struck his one ori- 
ginal note and made his one contribution to our 
literature. 

An English critic has said recently of Wil- 
liam Morris that, passionate as was his reaction 
against the ugliness of contemporary life and 
his determination to bring the beautiful back to 
its old place and function, his inability to turn 
a personal conviction into an overwhelming 
movement was evidenced by his failure to give 

216 




The Garden of Whitman's House in Camden 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

common, modern, useful things beautiful forms. 
He could give a chest or chair or table the ex- 
quisite symmetry or the massive lines which they 
had in their best estate, but he did not give us 
artistic lamp-posts and letter-boxes. Whitman 
did precisely this ; he took the roughest material 
close at hand, and not only divined its poetic 
significance, but resolutely set himself the task 
of making others recognize it. He was, fortu- 
nately, so accustomed to uncouthness, rough- 
ness, crudity, that these early conditions of all 
vital things did not repel him; on the contrary, 
they appealed to his imagination. He had 
grown up with them and made friends with 
them in those sensitive hours when the imagi- 
nation forms its intimacies; and the great 
rough, crude life of the new continent opened 
its heart to him. Other poets had divined what 
was in the American spirit and had heard notes 
that escaped him, but Whitman was the first 
poet to get into his verse the continental volume 
of American life, its vast flow through the chan- 
nels of a thousand occupations, its passionate 
practice of equality, its resolute assertion of the 
sanctity of the individual, its insistence on the 

219 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

supreme value of the native as against the ac- 
quired traits and qualities. 

That Whitman lost perspective and blurred 
the scale of values by breaking even partially 
with the long line of those who, in the days 
before him, had seen life at first hand is clear 
enough; but it may have been necessary for 
some poet to take democracy in its most elemen- 
tary form, without shading or qualification, to 
clear the way for the greater poet who will some 
day speak out of a knowledge as searching, a 
sympathy as profound, but with a clearer dis- 
cernment of spiritual degrees and orders. Whit- 
man did what no other poet had done: he ac- 
cepted not only the democratic ideal, but the life 
organized under it, without qualification, and 
with a deep joy in the new disclosure of the 
human spirit, the fresh evocation of human en- 
ergy, which it effected. Here and now, he de- 
clared, the American poet must claim his hour 
and his material; in the meanest and the worst 
the soul of goodness survives, in the roughest 
and crudest the soul of beauty hides itself. Some 
of that goodness he evoked, some of that beauty 
he made manifest. His attitude is expressed 

220 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

in lines which are prosaic in form but which re- 
veal his point of view and suggest the sources 
of his inspiration : 

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, 

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should 
be blithe and strong; 

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank 
or beam, 

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or 
leaves off work, 

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his 
boat, the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck, 

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hat- 
ter singing as he stands, 

The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in 
the morning, or at noon intermission or at sun- 
down, 

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young 
wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, 

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none 
else, 

The day what belongs to the day — at night the party 
of young fellows, robust, friendly, 

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. 

Emerson expressed the American spirit with 
singular clarity and beauty of phrase ; Whitman 
expressed the volume and range of American 
life; the greater poet who is to come will com- 

221 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

pass both spirit and body. He will honor man 
as man, labor as labor, the common use because 
it is common, as Whitman honored these things ; 
he will exalt the basal elements; but he will 
not rest in these primary stages of growth; 
he will not set the man in his undeveloped 
strength in antagonism with the man in his 
trained and ordered maturity. 

The mistake which many Whitman devotees 
have made is an old and familiar one ; they have 
set the crude man in antagonism to the devel- 
oped man; they have decried refinement, deli- 
cacy, sensitiveness, as signs of weakness and 
exalted the elementary forms of power as the 
only kinds of power. The cowboy and the 
miner are picturesque figures, but the force they 
represent is not a whit more normal and is far 
less highly organized than that of countless in- 
trepid, accomplished men who are carrying the 
burdens of society and doing its work in all 
departments without publicity or craving for 
applause. We need to get back to the primitive 
qualities from time to time, and it is a sugges- 
tive fact that, as a rule, it is those who are over- 
trained on some side who are clamorous for a 

222 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

return to primitive types and modes. But na- 
ture does not rest in these lower types; she 
steadily perfects her types by development. In 
the reaction against the conventional, artificial, 
purely academic view of things, it is sometimes 
necessary to break a few windows ; but breaking 
windows is always a temporary measure. Cul- 
ture in the true sense is simply the process of 
growth, and the man who fulfils his life by un- 
folding all his powers is a more natural man 
than he who has suffered an arrest of his de- 
velopment. Democracy cannot change the laws 
which govern human life ; it will be a great gain 
if it can bring in simplicity of living ; it is quite 
certain that it cannot and ought not to preserve 
native flavor by retarding normal growth. 
American literature will never become power- 
ful by the exaltation of the rough, the crude, 
the unclean; what it lacks is not frankness, but 
the original power which pierces to the heart of 
society and lays bare its dramatic significance 
as Thackeray did in " Vanity Fair." Great 
writers do not need to be either profane or ob- 
scene. 

Whitman was a pathfinder, and his joy in the 
223 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

great new world of human experience that he 
explored no one would take from him. It will be 
seen some day that there was a true prophetic 
strain in him, and that he marked the beginning, 
not of a new kind of literature, but of a new 
and National stage of literary development in 
this country. In his verse the sections disappear 
and the Nation comes into view, the provinces 
fade and the continent defines itself. It is man 
at work over a continent that stirs him ; he cele- 
brates few persons ; Lincoln alone seems to have 
moved him profoundly; even when he cele- 
brates himself it is as a kind of incarnation and 
embodiment of human qualities and experiences. 
In this attitude he was instinctively expressing 
his conception of Democracy as a vast brother- 
hood, in which all men are on an equality, irre- 
spective of individual traits and qualities. 

There is nothing finer in Whitman than his 
passion for comradeship; in his idealization of 
the fellowship between man and man he not 
only sounded some great, sincere notes, but he 
struck out some great lines in the heat of a feel- 
ing which seems always to have had quick ac- 
cess to his imagination. To this all-embracing 

224 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

affection, so deeply rooted in his conception of 
the democratic order, he devotes a large group 
of poems under the title " Calamus." These 
friends of the spirit are not chosen by any prin- 
ciple of taste; they are chiefly "powerful un- 
educated persons " : 

I am enamour'd of growing out-doors, 

Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or 

woods, 
Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of 

axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses, 
I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. 

It cannot be said with justice that Whitman 
erases all moral distinctions and rejects entirely 
the scale of spiritual values; but it is quite cer- 
tain that he blurs them, and reduces his world 
to unity by putting aside resolutely the prin- 
ciple of selection. His underlying religious con- 
ception of life is essentially Oriental, and dates 
back to the time before the idea of personality 
had been clearly grasped. This principle Whit- 
man does not consistently apply, for he lays 
tremendous emphasis on " powerful uneducated 
persons " ; but in a certain sense it is wrought 
into his presentation of the democratic society. 

225 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

In that presentation individuals sink into the 
vast community whose naked energy, power, 
vigor, and habit the poet loves to paint. Neither 
in life nor in art, in the material which he uses 
nor in the form in which he casts it, does he em- 
ploy that skill in selection which is one of the 
prime gifts of the artist. Whitman shows, as a 
consequence, no power of self-criticism ; no abil- 
ity to distinguish the good from the bad in his 
work, to separate poetry from prose. He has left 
a few pieces of unique quality of imagination 
and harmony embedded in a great mass of unor- 
ganized poetic material. In reading him one 
feels as if he were going through a vast atelier 
crowded with blocks of unhewn marble and huge 
piles of debris, with here and there a statue of 
noble and even majestic proportions. Whitman 
is easily travestied, but no one has ever done this 
impious thing half so well as he did himself in 
some of his most pretentious pieces. His devo- 
tees would render him the truest service if they 
would stop chanting his praise and thoroughly 
and critically edit his works. 

Whitman's great gift is his imagination, 
which is deep, fervent, pictorial, penetrating; 

226 






s. 




AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

an imagination, in force, volume, and power of 
flooding a great theme, quite beyond anything 
in our literature. In the New England poets 
generally the thinking faculty is more powerful 
than the faculty which makes images; this is 
the limitation of our earlier poets. There is too 
much intellect, which analyzes, separates, and 
defines, and too little imagination, which fuses, 
combines, and personifies. At his best, Whit- 
man's imagination has a tidal movement and 
depth. When " Out of the Cradle Endlessly 
Rocking " is read, with that intelligence of feel- 
ing which keeps the thought and tune in unison 
and makes them mutually interpretative, the 
sensitive listener is aware of a power which lies 
deeper than that put forth by any other Ameri- 
can poet, and which has an elemental energy 
and sweep ; as if nature had conspired with the 
poet and given his song a touch of her mys- 
tery and the ultimate music of those secret pro- 
cesses which build, out of sight, the beauty of 
the world. In such poems as " The Mystic 
Trumpeter," the " Passage to India," " When 
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," " Out 
of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," " O Cap- 

229 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

tain! My Captain! " Whitman establishes him- 
self, not only among the first of our poets, but, 
in respect of imaginative power, the first of the 
goodly company. This free and noble use of 
the creative faculty, at once unconventional and 
obedient to the law of art, is revealed in such 
lines as these: 

Here are our thoughts, voyager's thoughts. 

Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then 
by them be said, 

The sky overarches here, we feel the undulating deck be- 
neath our feet, 

We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless 
motion, 

The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast sug- 
gestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing 
syllables, 

The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the 
melancholy rhythm, 

The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are 
all here, 

And this is ocean's poem. 

Such passages as this, vital, fresh, deeply 
suggestive, full of the eternal movement of 
things, show the elemental power of this ex- 
traordinary man to whom nature gave so much; 
but this great gift was beset with marked limi- 

230 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

tations, and the spring of pure song often 
gushes out in a dreary waste of long-drawn-out 
categories and vast stretches of barren prose. 

Whitman, like Wordsworth, took himself at 
all times as one inspired; but with him, as with 
the author of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, there 
were long periods of uninspired dullness. And 
there is no conformity so monotonous as that 
of the nonconformist. Whitman's irregular 
dithyrambic verse is immensely impressive when 
the full tide of his imagination floods it, but 
when that tide is out it becomes machinery of 
the most ponderous kind. Much has been said 
about this verse as something new in the world ; 
as a matter of fact, it belongs to very ancient 
poetry. That diminishes not a whit the great- 
ness of Whitman's achievement, but it keeps 
us to the fact, which is quite essential in any 
adequate judgment of a man's work. Much has 
been said also about this verse as belonging to 
nature rather than to art; as if art were some- 
thing other than the best and therefore the most 
natural way of doing a thing. And so sound a 
critic as Mr. Burroughs has spoken, in this con- 
nection, of Tennyson and Browning as " liter- 

231 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

ary poets"; implying, apparently, that Whit- 
man was of a different kind. Now, in so far 
as Whitman was a poet he was a literary poet; 
when he is at his best his verse conforms to cer- 
tain laws of art as truly as the verse of the great 
poets who went before him. When he ceases to 
be literary in this sense, he ceases to be interest- 
ing. Nature and art are never antagonistic; 
they are supplementary. Whitman did not 
react against art, but against artifice, which is 
a very different matter. That Whitman had 
the feeling for art, for that order which reveals 
without intruding the most vital relations, is 
evident not only in his work at its best, but in 
his strikingly effective arrangement of his verse 
and prose in the forms in which he finally gave 
them to the world. 

No one has defined more impressively than 
Whitman the quality in writing which gives it 
that life that is always synonymous with the 
highest art: 

" The art of art, the glory of expression and 
the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. 
Nothing is better than simplicity . . . nothing 
can make up for excess or for the lack of defi- 

232 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

niteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and 
pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects 
their articulations are powers neither common 
nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature 
with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the 
movements of animals and the unimpeachable- 
ness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and 
grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of 
art. If you have looked on him who has 
achieved it you have looked on one of the mas- 
ters of the artists of all nations and times." 

Nothing could be more just and penetrating 
than this definition of the quality of a great 
writer ; by this definition Whitman's work must 
be tried; applying this test to that work, it ap- 
pears that some of it will survive and much of 
it will be cast aside. The race is already too 
heavily encumbered with luggage of all sorts; 
all the great writers must submit to a rigid re- 
examination from time to time; and Whitman 
will not be exempt from a test which has been 
applied to Goethe, to Wordsworth, and to By- 
ron. And it may be suspected that Whitman 
succeeds greatly where he conforms most closely 
to the great tradition of art which is the faithful 

233 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

and devout practice of all the great poets, and 
that he fails most lamentably where he attempts 
deliberately to create a new method. It is quite 
certain that in his case, as in that of Browning, 
the devotees have exalted his eccentricities and 
belittled his sanest and truest work. A man of 
original force like Whitman has far more to 
fear from injudicious and uncritical friends 
than from scornful and unsympathetic enemies. 
In his exaltation of the body Whitman's 
thought is less gross than his speech ; and at his 
worst his coarse frankness is more wholesome 
than the subtle and less offensive but far more 
corrupt treatment of such themes by some of 
the contemporary writers of the decadent school. 
Compared with the exquisitely artistic corrup- 
tion which D'Annunzio analyzes and depicts 
with such searching insight, Whitman's nudity 
of image and phrase is health itself. The ob- 
jection to Whitman's handling of these delicate 
and profoundly significant relations is not that 
it is unclean, but that it is inartistic. It is not 
immoral in the sense that it is corrupt, but it is 
immoral because it violates that instinct of reti- 
cence which protects these relations by keeping 

234 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

fresh the sentiment which invests them with the 
poetry of the creative process. This poetry 
Whitman ruthlessly destroys by denuding the 
whole mysterious relation of its mystery. In 
nothing does he more clearly reveal the curious 
artistic blindness which sometimes made him the 
most Philistine of poets than in this lack of 
sensitiveness to the delicacy, the spiritual sug- 
gestiveness, the deep and essential privacy of 
relations which belong to the most intimate life 
and which become brutal the moment they be- 
come public. 

The lack of fineness in Whitman, the insen- 
sibility to the appeal of the spiritual qualities 
of character, the absence of the note of distinc- 
tion, are very obvious when one studies his work 
in its relation to women; there is nowhere any 
touch of the spiritual chivalry which nearly all 
the great poets have shared; no suggestion of 
the power of beautiful portraiture with which 
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, for 
instance, have enriched the world with the im- 
ages of Andromeda, Beatrice, Rosalind, Mar- 
garet. The ' ' dream of fair women ' ' seems never 
to have come to Whitman; if it had, he could 

235 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

not possibly have treated the most intimate rela- 
tion between men and women as if it were a 
public function. There was a whole world of 
poetry from which, by the limitation of his na- 
ture, this powerful man was excluded. And 
this is the more singular because his was not a 
purely masculine genius ; there was a large infu- 
sion of the feminine in it. It is not so much 
sheer force and energy that impress one in 
Whitman as a certain diffused softness of 
feeling, a brooding affection, a seeking after 
and celebration of brotherliness, comradeship; 
most notably, in his striking and original treat- 
ment of death the element of tenderness is deli- 
cately and beautifully expressed. 

So many and so various are the qualities which 
Whitman reveals, so diverse are the moods with 
which one reads him, that the very difficulty of 
reaching a final judgment regarding his genius 
and rank becomes an evidence of something un- 
usual and commanding in the man. It is high 
time, surely, to see him as he is; to escape the 
blindness of those who have never been able to 
find anything but the " barbaric yawp " in him, 
and the idolatry of those who think that he has 

236 




A Byway in Huntington 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

abolished the laws of art. He was great in 
mass and magnitude rather than in altitude and 
quality; he had the richest endowment of im- 
agination that has yet been bestowed on any 
American poet, but his power of organizing it 
into noble and beautiful forms was far below the 
wealth of his material; he had an ear for the 
fundamental rhythms, but he often disregarded 
or violated his musical sense. He entered into 
the broad, elemental life of the country and 
caught its sweep of interest and occupation with 
fresh and original power, disclosing at times a 
passion of imagination which closely approaches 
great poetry and predicts the great poetry which 
will some day be written on this continent. 
Here Whitman is at his best and stands out as, 
in a very real sense, the distinctively American 
poet — the devout lover of democracy and its 
most ardent and eloquent singer. But even here 
there are limitations to be observed; for Whit- 
man speaks for a plane of society, not for its 
entirety; he cares for and understands the ele- 
mental and basal types ; he does not comprehend 
nor recognize the sharing of the great human 
qualities on a basis of equality by the more 

239 



AMERICA IN WHITMANS POETRY 

highly developed types. And democracy, it 
must be remembered, does not mean the average 
man only; it means all men. 

Whitman has a fundamentally religious view 
of life which makes him brother with all men 
and in sympathy with all experience; but he 
has no affinity with the higher and holier attain- 
ments of character; he fails to recognize the 
immense chasm which yawns between the saint 
and the deliberate and persistent sinner, which 
may be bridged hereafter, but which is, now 
and here, a tremendous fact. He is, at his best, 
master of a fresh, suggestive, deeply impressive 
phrase, which brings with it something of the 
immediate and convincing cogency and charm 
of nature ; at his worst he is ponderous, prosaic, 
and eminently uninspired. When his inspira- 
tion ebbs, he stereotypes himself. He has writ- 
ten a little group of poems which are more dis- 
tinctive and original than any others that have 
come from an American hand ; he has written a 
vast mass of irregular verse which has no pos- 
sible relation to poetry, and which ought, as 
a matter of justice to his genius and memory, 
to be separated from his real work and put into 

240 



r«fc - : *- 'J& 



38%M ^ 







Whitman's Grave at Camden 



AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY 

that storage -room to which most of the great 
writers have made unwilling contributions. Af- 
ter this has been done there will remain a small 
body of verse that is likely to last as long as any- 
thing in American poetry. 



243 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 





MMsM&Mi 





R. LANG has said that, of- 
ten as it has been his for- 
tune to write about Sir Wal- 
ter Scott, he has never sat 
down to do so without a 
sense of happiness and ela- 
tion. " It is," he writes, " as 
if one were meeting a dear friend, or at least 
were to talk with other friends about him. This 
emotion is so strong, no doubt, because the name 
and memory and magic of Sir Walter are 
entwined with one's earliest recollections of 
poetry, and nature, and the vines and hills of 
home." It is easy, and of late years it has been 
a kind of literary convention, to emphasize the 
defects in Scott's work ; its loose and often awk- 

249 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

ward construction, the verbosity of the style, the 
lack of selection and the consequent overcrowd- 
ing of the story, the carelessness of a born ra- 
conteur who has more incidents at command 
than he can wisely use. These faults are so 
obvious that it is unnecessary to recall them. 
There is, however, something humorous in the 
patronizing attitude of a little group of very 
modern, deft, expert framers of sentences to- 
ward this large, friendly, affluent mind, this 
warm, generous, gracious spirit, who shares with 
Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Dumas, and Vic- 
tor Hugo the indifference of the possessor of 
a great fortune to the details of his bequests to 
his kind. Scott ought to have been more stu- 
dious of form, more fastidious of style; he 
ought to have written with more deliberation 
and revised with more rigor ; but when all these 
defects are charged up against him, how heavily 
the language and the race remain indebted to 
him, and how painfully lacking in perception 
is the criticism which reports the shadows but 
ignores the light which streams from this great- 
hearted man! 

If the claim of the author of " Quentin Dur- 
250 



— 
a> 

W 

H 




ff? 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

ward " to a large place in the literature of the 
English-speaking peoples could not be estab- 
lished by putting his works in evidence, the 
charm of his personality and the story of his 
heroic struggle to die with honor would invest 
him with a human and romantic interest of the 
kind which gives wings to certain names and 
sends them on a level flight with time. 

The sensitiveness to form as form, the deli- 
cacy of taste in detail, the nice feeling for the 
subtle relations between thought and speech, 
the light touch on the magical elements in lan- 
guage, which constitute the artistic equipment 
of Poe, De Maupassant, Pater, and Henry 
James, are not to be found in Scott ; he belongs 
to another order of artists, another class of those 
who minister to the needs of the spirit. Even 
these accomplished writers present large arid 
surfaces and are at times unconscionable of- 
fenders against the very taste they cultivate. 
Poe permits himself the most repulsive detail 
in the introduction of horrors from which the 
sensitive instinctively turn away; Mr. James 
was once described by a friendly critic of notable 
sanity as " on the whole, in places, the worst 

253 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

writer of the time " ; De Maupassant's moral 
sense was so dulled that in his most delicate art 
he sometimes gives his reader's normal instinct 
a blow between the eyes without the slightest 
consciousness that he has betrayed his defect 
of insight; while Mr. Pater's essay on " Style " 
is a terrible example of the way in which he 
ought not to have done it. These subtle workers 
in gold, ivory, and clay have their own place 
and are getting more perhaps than their share 
of honor from this generation; but those who 
accept them as the final arbiters of form, the 
ultimate court of appeal in all questions of style, 
must make place for the less delicate but more 
vital makers of imperishable images; for the 
large, virile, fecund natures who, from Homer 
to Tolstoi, have wrought with a certain careless 
ease born of the consciousness of the command 
of inexhaustible resources. If those lovers of 
Scott whose taste is catholic but whose courage 
is weak need the confirmation of the judgment 
of the great, let them take heart in the compan- 
ionship of Goethe, the first of literary critics, and 
of Thackeray, one of the first of literary artists. 
The root of Scott's offending is the root of 
254 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

his greatness: he is not literary in the technical 
sense of the word. There is nothing profes- 
sional about him; he is primarily a Scotch gen- 
tleman and landed proprietor. He has a nat- 
ural, out-of-doors way with him which vitally 
relates him to his people and his country and 
makes him companionable to all sorts of people. 
It is not necessary to take a special course in the 
history of thought to understand him. He has 
no reform on his heart, save the ancient and hon- 
orable passion to make the rules of honor bear 
on all men's consciences and to set the ideals of 
courage and courtesy before every man's eyes. 
He was not bent on solving the problems of his 
time. He was fortunate enough to live in a time 
which did not confuse fiction with psychology. 
He did not write semi-historical romances be- 
cause it was easy and profitable, but because his 
heart and imagination were equally under the 
spell of the rich store of Scottish legends and 
annals. He was, fortunately for us, a Tory, and 
the French Revolution confirmed his early bent. 
He was, in a word, in the best possible attitude 
to receive those elements out of early and con- 
temporary life which gave his genius wings, and 

255 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

equipped him to set the spectacle of life before 
the world as he saw it through a vivacious, pic- 
torial imagination. 

Scott was not a subtle strategist in art, play- 
ing a deep game with his readers, employing 
a highly elaborate technique to produce delicate 
effects on a few elect minds ; he always moves in 
the open, masses his forces, and wins his way by 
mass and force. He deals with those fundamen- 
tal experiences which, being common to all men, 
are, by reason of their universality, the most 
inclusive and profound happenings that befall 
human kind; and his manner has the breadth 
and simplicity which are harmonious with his 
themes. The great movements which give color 
and direction to human affairs are neither set 
in motion nor controlled by finesse, dexterity, 
subtle suggestion ; they have their source in wide 
stirrings of the conscience or of the imagination, 
and find leadership in capacious, virile minds. 
Scott was entirely lacking in subtlety, but sub- 
tlety is not depth; he was without finesse, but 
finesse is not power. Depth he had and power 
in abundance ; he was deep not as the pools but 
as the ocean, and his power was not that of 

256 




rX 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

delicate mechanism, but of the large, elemental 
forces of nature. 

A man of such broad, sincere, sane genius as 
Scott is always vitally related to his people and 
his country ; for genius is a spiritual rather than 
an intellectual gift, and makes its richest con- 
tribution to thought through divination rather 
than by logical processes. As Homer divined 
what lay in the heart of his race, as Dante felt 
even more deeply than he understood the Spirit 
of the Middle Age, as Shakespeare read the 
secret records which life had written in the spirit 
of the race, so Scott, with less insight and dra- 
matic power, but with kindred breadth of sym- 
pathy, comprehended his country and people 
and made himself their foremost interpreter and 
historian. For Scotland lives in the books of 
her great romancer as she lives in no work of 
history. What has happened to her may be 
read elsewhere ; what has happened in her must 
be sought in the Waverley Novels and the poems 
from the same hand. 

Scott found practically all his material ready 
to his hand, and so intimately is his work asso- 
ciated with Scottish scenery, history, and legend 

259 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

that the bare record of the points of contact 
would exceed the limits of this comment on the 
background against which Rob Roy, Di Vernon, 
Jeanie Deans, Claverhouse, Meg Merrilies, 
Bonnie Prince Charlie, and a host of figures 
with whom the English-speaking peoples have 
long lived on terms of intimacy, move and have 
their being. To place the men and women 
whom Scott created or recalled in their local en- 
vironment one must have at hand a history and 
a map of Scotland; it must suffice here to empha- 
size the importance of the background as an ele- 
ment in Scott's work. 

It is in childhood that the intimacies of the 
imagination are most easily established, and 
nothing enters into the background of an artist's 
work until it has been assimilated by the imagi- 
nation. Familiarity with places, with outlooks, 
with the richest associations, does not of itself 
create the mood in which a man enlarges the 
horizons of his consciousness so to include his 
surroundings that they become part of his un- 
conscious as well as of his conscious life; to the 
sense of sight must be added vision ; to the inti- 
macy of physical acquaintance must be added 

260 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

the knowledge that comes with brooding over 
enchanting or impressive scenes, the meditation 
that opens the heart of a legend. As a boy 
and youth Scott became first familiar and then 
intimate with the country and the history of 
Scotland. 

A great career is always the consummation 
of a long course of preparation, and the base of 
Scott's achievement was laid by his ancestry. 
He came of the right stock ; the blood of roman- 
cers ran in his veins. If he had inherited a 
family memory, it would have rung with the 
shouts of ancient border warfare, with the cries 
of the clans, with all the tumult of Highland 
life. He was kinsman of the Campbells, the 
Macdonalds, the Rutherfords, the Hardens, the 
great feudal house of Buccleuch. He spoke 
humorously of the Scotchman's respect for his 
pedigree in the fragment of autobiography, but 
when he built Abbotsf ord he had the armorial 
bearings of his ancestors emblazoned on the 
ceiling of the great hall. The social importance 
of his descent was a minor matter compared with 
its possible bequest to his imagination. 

He was not only born in the ranks of the 
261 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

men of romance, but in one of the most roman- 
tic cities of the Old World. Always gray and 
often somber in the fogs and dim wintry twi- 
lights of the far north, Edinburgh takes rank 
with Florence and Venice among the cities which 
appeal not only to the imagination by reason of 
a history rich in audacity, in picturesque inci- 
dent, and in mysterious tragedy, but to the eye 
by reason of beauty of situation, nobility of 
structure, distinction of individuality. The 
great commercial cities, as a rule, run out in 
long lines or spread themselves over vast level 
areas; Edinburgh seems always visible to the 
eye in its entirety, so nobly do the hills rise about 
it crowned with castle and monument. One can 
stand in the heart of the Scottish capital and 
see it not only spread out but rising about him 
in impressive lines. 

The city of to-day is vastly changed from 
the old town in which the novelist was born on 
August 15, 1771; there are beautiful gardens 
and broad streets where he may have played 
over open fields ; but the Castle still frowns on 
the hill as in the earlier times, and the street runs 
precipitously down to St. Giles through lofty 

262 



crq 




THE LAND OF SCOTT 

buildings in which the old wynds are still found ; 
and Holyrood sits amid the ruins, and Calton 
Hill, with the High School on its slope and 
crowned by the unfinished line of Doric col- 
umns, not only adds a strikingly picturesque 
feature to the city, but interprets and symbol- 
izes its high quality of intellectual life, its ancient 
and loyal devotion to learning. 

The Edinburgh of to-day includes a new city, 
built up since Scott was born, along the base of 
the old city. In Princes Street this New Town 
has the most picturesque thoroughfare through 
which the tides of life ebb and flow. Its breadth, 
the solidity and harmony of the buildings that 
line it on one side, and the beautiful gardens 
that give it the freshness and charm of foliage 
and sward on the other; the great cliff rising 
abruptly beyond, with the Castle on the summit, 
the impressive monuments and public buildings, 
impart to modern Edinburgh a dignity and dis- 
tinction entirely its own. 

The New Town and Scott were born about 
the same time, but the associations of his youth 
center in the picturesque Old Town. Here, 
as everywhere in this irreverent modern world 

265 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

intent on convenience and not scrupulous about 
landmarks, radical changes have been made 
since 1771; but High Street still runs its steep 
course from the Castle to St. Giles, and there, 
of a Sunday morning, the swirl of the pipes is 
still heard as the Highlanders come swinging 
down, with flying tartans, to the military ser- 
vice. " A sloping high street and many side 
lanes, covering like some wrought tissue of stone 
and mortar, like some rhinoceros skin, with 
many a gnarled embossment, church steeple, 
chimney head, Tolbooth and other ornament or 
indispensability, back and ribs of the slope " 
— to recall Carlyle's description of the place as 
he saw it in his youth. 

Many destructive changes had already been 
made, but then as now the conformation and 
character of the town are clearly discernible. 
The narrow thoroughfares, the lofty stone build- 
ings, the dark closes, the crowding of the popula- 
tion on the ridge of the great rock, made old 
Edinburgh an extension of its Castle. A rock 
of refuge and a place of defense, with the Cas- 
tle at one end and the Abbey at the other, it was 
proudly defiant of the Highlands to the north 

266 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

whence bands of ravagers descended and swept 
the land as the Norsemen the shores of France 
in the days before Hollo, and of the Border on 
the south, full of unrest and turbulence. 

If the enchantments of the Middle Age did not 
invest the Edinburgh into which Scott was born, 
the wild, romantic history of centuries of strug- 
gle had left their records on every side. It was 
a veritable citadel of ancient tradition ; nowhere 
else in Europe are population and historical 
association more congested. The old fifteen- 
story buildings, the forerunners of the great 
business structures of to-day, Have disappeared, 
but ten stories still tower above the narrow closes 
and wynds, and armorial bearings, antique door- 
handles, link-extinguishers, carven fmials, half- 
erased dates and inscriptions, are still to be 
found. Foul with the surviving odors of the 
evil-smelling Middle Age, full of squalor re- 
deemed by touches of splendor, dark and 
gloomy but rich in haunting memories, the 
city which held in its heart St. Giles and the 
Old Tolbooth— the " Heart of Midlothian "— 
was a veritable fairyland to a boy of Scott's pic- 
torial imagination. Born of an ancestry which 

267 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

included the " Bould Rutherfords that were sae 
stout/' William Boltfoot of Harden, always the 
first " to tak the foord," the " Flower of Yar- 
row," whose sweetness lives in song, it was 
Scott's great good fortune to open his eyes on a 
world which preserved the records of the age 
of which he was to be the chief recorder, to 
store his memory and stimulate his imagination 
in those sensitive years in which a man instinc- 
tively reaches after the things which belong to 
his temperament and genius, and takes them to 
himself without knowing that he is making 
ready for his work. 

The son of a " Writer to the Signet," with 
a fondness for " analyzing the abstruse feudal 
doctrines connected with conveyancing," Scott 
was born not far from the heart of the Old 
Town, in a house which stood at the head 
of College Wynd, then a fashionable quarter. 
Here Oliver Goldsmith had once lived in the 
days of his study at the University, and through 
this street in Scott's infancy Boswell conducted 
Dr. Johnson to the University. The house in 
which the senior Walter Scott lived was pulled 
down to make room for the present University 

268 




I 
< 

u 

o 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

building, which was begun in 1789 and com- 
pleted nearly half a century later. 

The death of six children in rapid succession 
gave ground for the suspicion that College 
Wynd was not a wholesome locality, and shortly 
after the birth of the future novelist the family 
removed to George's Square, a more open sec- 
tion of the town, of which Lord Cockburn 
writes: "With its pleasant, trim-kept gardens, 
it has an air of antiquated grandeur about it, 
and retains not a few traces of its former dig- 
nity and seclusion." Here, in a neighborhood 
crowded with historical and literary associations 
and memories, Walter Scott lived during his 
boyhood and youth and well on into his early 
manhood. He could not walk the few squares 
to his first school in Bristo Street, or, later, to 
the high, narrow building in the High School 
Yards, or, still later, to the " Town's College," 
as the University was called, without being as- 
sailed from every quarter by the memories of 
great men or of those great events which wait 
upon great men. 

Before he was two years old, Scott lost the 
use of his right leg, as the result of an illness, 

271 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

in a way that baffled the skill of the physicians, 
and was sent to his grandfather's farm, Sandy- 
Knowe, in order to secure better and freer condi- 
tions. The village of Smailholm, in Roxburgh- 
shire, was then a small hamlet, in that Scottish 
Border, of which the poet and romancer took 
such complete possession by the power of his 
imagination that it has become " the Scott 
Country " for all time : the home of romance 
and poetry, through which the Tweed flows, 
dear to all the world because its murmur was 
music in the ears of the broken but heroic man 
who came home to Abbotsford to die in 1832. 

Smailholm lies on a ridge and commands a 
wide landscape to the Cheviot Hills and the 
slopes of Lammermoor. In the simple farm- 
house the " puir lame laddie " was tenderly 
watched over, and there he heard for the first 
time, with conscious interest, those stories of 
daring and of achievement which were to form 
the richest material of his education. In a vol- 
ume of Ramsay's " Tea Table Miscellany " in 
the library at Abbotsford he wrote: " This book 
belonged to my grandfather, Robert Scott, and 
out of it I was taught ' Hardy Knute ' by heart 

272 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

long before I could read the ballad myself. It 
was the first poem I ever learned — the last I 
shall ever forget." 

The countryside was rich in romantic as- 
sociation, and the list of its localities to-day 
reads like a resume of Scott's life and work. 
Mertown's Halls; the Brethren Stanes; Dry- 
burgh, where Scott and Lockhart sleep to- 
gether in one of those burial-places the very love- 
liness of which is a symbol of immortality; the 
landmarks of Yarrow and Ettrick; the peaks 
of Peeblesshire; the crags of Hume; the vale 
of the Gala; "such were the objects," writes 
Lockhart, " that had painted the earliest images 
on the eye of the last and greatest of the Border 
Minstrels." 

It was in the farm-house at Smailholm that 
Scott first became conscious that he was in the 
world and a very considerable part of it, and 
one of his earliest recollections was lying on the 
floor of the little parlor, " stripped and swathed 
up in a sheepskin, warm as it was flayed from 
the carcass of the animal." The child's grand- 
mother was a repository of Scottish legend and 
tradition, in whose youth the stories of the Bor- 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

der depredations were matters of comparatively 
recent history. She told him many a tale of 
Watt of Harden, Jamie Telf er of the Fair Dod- 
head, and heroes of kindred spirit — "merry 
men all, of the persuasion and calling of Robin 
Hood and Little John." A very pretty picture 
of Scott at this earliest period remains in the 
record of an acquaintance of the grandparents : 
" Old Mrs. Scott sitting, with her spinning- 
wheel, at one side of the # flre, in a clean, clean 
parlor; the grandfather, a good deal failed, in 
his elbow-chair opposite ; and the little boy lying 
on the carpet at the old man's feet, listening to 
the Bible, or whatever good book Miss Jennie 
was reading to them." Miss Jennie was one of 
those invaluable aunts whose happy fortune it 
is to read fairy stories to children and to be al- 
ways touched with the glow of romance which 
streams from their fascinating pages. 

In his fourth year the boy was taken to Bath 
in pursuit of strength. He had gained greatly 
in general vigor, and his life was probably saved 
by the prompt and thorough measures taken by 
his father. He had lived largely in the open 
air, and those fine days when he was carried out 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

and laid on the rocks by the old shepherd while 
the sheep browsed around them had invigorated 
his body while they nourished his imagination. 
He now became a sturdy child, with a slight limp, 
but able to share to the full the pleasures of 
exercise and of sport. In London he saw the 
Tower and Westminster Abbey, but the chief 
incident of this first journey and residence in 
England was a night at the theater, where he 
saw "As You Like It." Years afterward he 
wrote that the witchery of the whole scene was 
still alive in his mind ; and he remembered being 
so much scandalized at the quarrel between Or- 
lando and his brother in the first scene that he 
cried out, " A'n't they brothers? " Later he re- 
called with pleasure the Parade in Bath, with 
the winding Avon, the lowing of cattle on the 
opposite hills, and the splendors of a certain 
shop in the town. He was afflicted at this time 
by a superstitious fear of statuary, and was 
cured of this failing by familiarity with a statue 
of Neptune which stood beside the river. 

There were rapid changes of place in the 
search for health during the next few months, 
and the boy's time was unevenly divided between 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

Edinburgh, Sandy-Knowe, and Prestonpans. 
It was at this time that an accomplished lady, 
after spending a night in the home in George's 
Square, wrote these prophetic words to a friend 
the following day: " I last night supped in Mr. 
Walter Scott's. He has the most extraordinary 
genius of a boy I ever saw. He was reading a 
poem to his mother when I went in. I made 
him read on; it was the description of a ship- 
wreck. His passion rose with the storm. He 
lifted his eyes and hands. ' There's the mast 
gone,' says he; ' crash it goes! — they all perish! ' 
After his agitation he turns to me. ' That is 
too melancholy,' says he ; ' I had better read you 
something more amusing.' I preferred a little 
chat, and asked his opinion of Milton and other 
books he was reading, which he gave me wonder- 
fully." At Prestonpans he had the good for- 
tune to make the acquaintance of a veteran who 
was resting in the village on half -pay after his 
campaigns, and who found in the boy an eager 
and patient listener, with an insatiable appetite 
for tales of adventure and descriptions of mili- 
tary feats. 

After a short attendance at a private school 
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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

in Edinburgh, and, later, instruction at the 
hands of a tutor, Scott's formal education was 
begun in the High School, where he describes 
himself as popular by reason of his good nature 
and ready imagination, but much given to fri- 
volity and neglect of study. He had already 
begun to write verses, chiefly remarkable, as 
youthful verses often are, for piety and lack of 
inspiration : 

ON A THUNDER-STORM 

Loud o'er my head though awful thunders roll, 
And vivid lightnings flash from pole to pole, 
Yet 5 t is thy voice, my God, that bids them fly, 
Thy arm directs those lightnings through the sky ; 
Then let the good- thy mighty name revere, 
And hardened sinners thy just vengeance fear. 

This didactic mood, so normal in an unde- 
veloped boy, was humanized by wholesome ac- 
tivity; for Scott was " more distinguished in the 
yards than in the class." The boy had early re- 
solved not to let his lameness stand in the way 
of a free and vigorous physical life, and before 
he left the High School he had become one of 
the boldest and surest-footed climbers of " the 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

kittle nine stanes," a perilous passage on the 
face of the Castle rock. 

The interval between leaving the High School 
and entering the University was spent with the 
aunt who had already had so large a place in 
his vital education, in a cottage at Kelso. He 
was then twelve years old, and at the age when 
the imagination is most easily stirred and im- 
pressed. His surroundings during those im- 
pressionable months left ineffaceable images in 
his memory, and had no small place in his prepa- 
ration for his work. He described Kelso as the 
" most beautiful if not the most romantic vil- 
lage in Scotland, presenting objects not only 
grand in themselves, but venerable for their as- 
sociations." The cottage stood in a garden, with 
long paths between hedges of yew and horn- 
beam; there were thickets of flowering shrubs, 
a bower, and an arbor accessible only through 
a labyrinth. Chief among the trees of the gar- 
den was a great platanus under which the boy 
took a long leap in his education when " Percy's 
Reliques " fell into his hands for the first time. 
He attended the Grammar School at Kelso dur- 
ing this period, but his real teacher was the 

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a 
o 

c 

o 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

noble country about him, through which he 
walked with the energy of an explorer and the 
joy of a poet. Two rivers, beautiful in them- 
selves and flowing out of the fairyland of Scot- 
tish stmg and story, — the Tweed and the Teviot, 
— were close at hand; ancient and picturesque 
ruins were within reach. He was fast coming 
to his own, though he did not know it until years 
later, and he was instinctively taking to himself 
the stuff of life in nature and books which was 
to enrich his spirit and give his genius strength 
of wing. 

He found the most fascinating and, in a way, 
the most liberating of all his text-books in the 
Kelso library, and read them out-of-doors in 
the shade of a plane-tree. " I remember well 
the spot," he wrote later, " where I read those 
volumes for the first time. It was beneath a 
huge platanus, in the ruins of what had been 
intended for an old-fashioned arbor in the gar- 
den I have mentioned. The summer day sped 
onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp 
appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, 
was sought for with anxiety, and was still found 
entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read, 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

to remember, was in this instance the same thing, 
and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fel- 
lows, and all who would hearken to me, with 
tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop 
Percy. The first time, too, I could scrape a few 
shillings together, which were not common oc- 
currences with me, I bought unto myself a copy 
of these beloved volumes ; nor do I believe I ever 
read a book half so frequently or with half the 
enthusiasm." This was perhaps the most sig- 
nificant moment in Scott's education, as was the 
reading of Spenser's " Faerie Queene " in the 
education of Keats. 

James Ballantyne, whose acquaintance, made 
at this time, was probably the most momentous 
happening in his external life, tells us that dur- 
ing this period Scott was devoted to antiquarian 
lore and was the best story-teller he ever knew. 
" He soon discovered that I was as fond of lis- 
tening as he himself was of relating; and I re- 
member it was a thing of daily occurrence that, 
after he had made himself master of his own 
lesson, I, alas, being still sadly to seek in mine, 
he used to whisper to me, ' Come, slink over be- 
side me, Jamie, and I '11 tell you a story.' " And 

284 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

Scott has been inviting the world for eighty 
years to sit beside him and listen, and the magic 
is still potent. 

He has left a very definite report of the deep 
joy which entered his soul in those days of his 
dawning intellectual life, the glow of his imag- 
ination, under the spell of the beauty of the Bor- 
der and of its romantic associations. From this 
time the love of natural beauty, especially when 
associated with ancient splendor, became a pas- 
sion with him. 

In November, 1783, Scott entered the Hu- 
manity and Greek classes in the University of 
Edinburgh; but these formal studies did not in- 
terrupt the education which, by the instinct of 
genius, he had marked out for himself. Every 
Saturday, and more frequently during vaca- 
tions, he was in the habit of climbing Salisbury 
Crags, Arthur's Seat, or Blackford Hill, with 
a bundle of books from the circulating library; 
and in the silence and solitude of the summit, 
Edinburgh at their feet, the Firth in the dis- 
tance, the bluebells about them, and the shadows 
resting on the Pentland hills, these boys read to- 
gether Spenser, Ariosto, Boiardo, and the other 

285 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

masters of the romantic mood. This habit, kept 
up for several years, made Scott so familiar with 
stories of knight-errantry and of romantic love 
and adventure that he could recite them from 
memory by the hour. In this extra-university 
fashion, after the manner of boys of talent since 
colleges began, Scott learned Italian until he 
could read it with ease, and began a collection of 
ballads of which six volumes are preserved in 
the library at Abbotsf ord. He learned enough 
Spanish to read and enjoy " Don Quixote." 
Pulci, the Decameron, Brantome, he knew; and 
Froissart, it is hardly necessary to say, he had 
at his fingers' ends. He fastened like a tiger, 
he tells us, on any collection of old songs and 
romances that came in his way. Of his intel- 
lectual interests and occupations at this period 
he probably gives a faithful account in " Wa- 
verley " : "In English literature, he was mas- 
ter of Shakespeare and Milton, of our earlier 
dramatic authors, of many picturesque and 
interesting passages from our old historical 
chronicles, and was particularly well acquainted 
with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets, who 
have exercised themselves on romantic fiction, — 
of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful 

286 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

imagination, before the passions have roused 
themselves and demand poetry of a more senti- 
mental description." James Sibbald's circulat- 
ing library in the Parliament Square had more 
to do with Scott's education, it may be suspected, 
than the University; and what the library could 
not teach he learned on the Tweedside and in 
the Highlands. 

The details of Scott's career at the Bar, as a 
translator, editor, poet, and, finally, as a novelist, 
would be out of place in this endeavor to bring 
into clear relief the background of his work by 
showing the great part which it played in his 
education. Notwithstanding his lameness, he 
was one of the most active men of his time in 
most forms of exercise. During his High School 
and University days he came to know the coun- 
try about Edinburgh by heart, in numberless 
long walks. Later he wandered farther afield 
on foot or on horseback, and his father began 
to protest that he was becoming a strolling 
peddler. His principal object in these long 
excursions, he tells us, was the pleasure of 
seeing romantic scenery and of visiting localities 
associated with historical events. 

Wandering over the battle-field of Bannock- 
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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

burn gave him deeper delight than the noble 
view from the walls of Stirling Castle, not be- 
cause the sweep of that great landscape did not 
appeal to him, but because his interest in all his- 
torical memorials was so keen and his genius for 
discovering their significance so great. " Show 
me an old castle or a battle-field and I was at 
home at once, filled it with its combatants in their 
proper costume, and overwhelmed my hearers 
by the enthusiasm of my description." Such 
glimpses into Scott's mind bring into clear light 
the sincerity and integrity of his selection of 
his material. The age and genius of chivalry, 
the habit and costume of feudalism, were as real 
and vital to him as were the standards and man- 
ners of the society in which Becky Sharp lived 
to Thackeray, or as the " form and pressure " 
of the life of the hour is to the most uncom- 
promising of contemporary realists. 

Scott's acquaintance with the Border was 
intimate and began with his earliest childhood; 
his knowledge of the Highlands probably dates 
from his fifteenth year. His first excursion into 
a region which was still distant and wild was 
made in the autumn of 1786 or 1787, as the guest 

290 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

of an ardent Jacobite of Invernahyde, who had 
taken part in the risings of 1715 and 1745, whose 
loyalty to the exiled house of Scotland was a 
steady flame, and who, in his old age, cherished 
the hope of drawing his claymore once more be- 
fore he died. Never was a writer of romantic 
temper more fortunate than was Scott on this 
memorable visit to the section whose tragic story 
he was to write with inimitable pathos and humor. 
It was a true journey of discovery; a veritable 
conquest of the imagination. When the vale 
of Perth first opened before him, he tells us that 
he pulled up the reins without meaning to do 
so and gazed on the scene as if he were afraid it 
would shift, like the scenes in a theater, before he 
could distinctly observe its different parts, or 
convince himself that what he saw was real. 

But still deeper was the delight with which 
he listened to the stories of his enthusiastic host, 
who was not only the custodian of the history 
and legends of the Highlands, but the incarna- 
tion of the intrepid and romantic temper of the 
Highlander. From the lips of this veteran of 
the last heroic stand for a lost cause and a fallen 
house in Scotland the future author of " Wa- 

291 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

verley" and "Rob Roy" listened spellbound 
to the moving tale of the campaigns with Mar 
and Charles Edward; of his hiding in a rocky 
cave not far from his own house, which was in 
the hands of English troops, after the battle of 
Culloden ; of his broadsword duel with Rob Roy ; 
of a hundred other incidents which fired the 
boy's heart and stored his memory with roman- 
tic material. 

Year after year these expeditions into the 
wilder parts of Scotland were repeated, until 
Scott came to have not only complete knowledge 
of the topography of the Highlands and of the 
coast, but to carry in his mind a kind of histori- 
cal and legendary map of Scotland in which all 
the centers of story and points of interest in 
the Border and the Highlands were distinctly 
marked. 

His first sight of Loch Katrine, which he was 
to endear to the whole world, was gained under 
military escort, while he was a writer's appren- 
tice and on legal business, the little cavalcade 
being in charge of a sergeant who was a reposi- 
tory of local traditions. These raids, as Scott 
called them, gave him acquaintance not only 

292 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

with the country but with people of every rank 
and condition, and with the rich fund of song 
and story that floated about Scotland from 
vale to vale and from farthest Sutherlandshire 
to the English border. To know men who had 
known Rob Roy, to hear the story of the two 
risings which had shaken Scotland like an earth- 
quake, to be a guest in remote and lonely castles, 
to be guided through wild defiles and over vast 
mountain ranges by kilted clansmen whose only 
speech was Gaelic and whose claymores were 
still at the service of their chiefs — this was the 
real education of the writer who was to be the 
scribe of his country, the truest of her historians. 
He had taken the hand of the man who sent 
the fiery cross through Appin before the last 
and most tragic pouring out of fanatical loyalty 
in the Highlands; he had a portrait of Prince 
Charles, purchased by some of his earliest sav- 
ings ; there was still a " king over the sea," and 
many were the glasses that were dashed to the 
floor after his health had been drunk in Scottish 
castles and homes; the heroic age was still so 
near that its glow had not faded from the im- 
agination: surely no poet and romancer was 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

more fortunately born than the author of " The 
Lady of the Lake " and of the romances which 
bear on their title-pages the name of Walter 
Scott! 

The Highlands had a large place in Scott's 
imagination, as they have in his novels, but his 
heart was in the Border, and Ruskin was well 
within the truth when he wrote: " Scott's life 
was, in all the joyful strength of it, spent in the 
valley of the Tweed. Rosebank, in the Lower 
Tweed, gave him his close knowledge of the 
district of Flodden Field, and his store of foot- 
traveler's interest in every glen of Ettrick, Yar- 
row, and Liddel Water." Smailholm and Kelso 
were among his earliest homes, and when he 
chose the place which of all others appealed to 
him most he turned instinctively to the banks 
of the Tweed. 

Scott saw Abbotsford in his mind's eye long 
before the first stone had been laid. Not far 
from the place where the house stands the last 
of the great battles between the clans was fought 
in 1526, and the elder Walter Scott went over 
the ground with the future Laird when the lat- 
ter was still a boy. In 1811 the boy, become a 

296 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

man of distinction and considerable fortune, 
purchased the farm property of Cartleyhole, 
with a small house fast going to decay. No 
place could have offered more, however, to the 
man who saw the locality not only with his eyes 
but with his imagination. The Tweed flowed 
through the very heart of the landscape, gentle 
hills gathered about it, the glens of Ettrick and 
Yarrow were within reach, and Melrose and 
Dryburgh were not distant. 

To-day the whole region seems like a page in 
the life of the builder of Abbotsford; but dur- 
ing the first years of his ownership the most 
unambitious designs were in his mind. In 1812 
he wrote to Byron: " I am laboring here to con- 
tradict an old proverb, and make a silk purse 
out of a sow's ear, namely, to convert a bare 
hough and brae into a comfortable farm." In 
thirteen years the cottage became a castle and 
the farm an estate ; and this transformation had 
involved the expenditure of great sums of 
money. At Christmas in 1824 the completion 
of the castle was celebrated by a great house- 
warming. 

For a time Scott was supremely happy; he 
297 



THE LAND OF SCOTT 

had a noble estate in the heart of the country 
he loved ; his house was a museum of antiquarian 
objects; he had a fine library; guests came and 
went in long procession. Into the house, as into 
everything to which he set his hand, Scott put 
his heart; it was the expression of all the mani- 
fold interests of his life: " Abbotsf ord was 
reared on no set plan, but with the desire to re- 
produce some of those features of ancient Scot- 
tish architecture which Scott most venerated. 
It was at once a monument of the high histori- 
cal imagination from which sprang his more 
enduring memorial, and of the over-zeal which 
may be lavished, with very disastrous results, 
on the mere ' pomp and circumstance of time ' 
— the all-absorbing passion 

" To call this wooded patch of earth his own, 
And rear the pile of ill-assorted stone, 
And play the grand old feudal lord again." 

In the dining-room he hung the portraits of 
his ancestors, and there, on a quiet autumn after- 
noon in 1832, the brave struggle over, the end 
came: " A beautiful day, so warm that my win- 
dow was wide open, and so perfectly still that 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

the sound of all others most delicious to his ear — 
the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles — 
was distinctly audible as we knelt around the 
bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his 
eyes." From that sacred place and scene came 
a word which the world will never forget — the 
last word to Lockhart: "Be a good man, my 
dear." 

It has been charged against Scott, in the years 
of reaction against the romantic spirit in fiction, 
that he is the painter of the life and manners of 
Feudalism, and therefore a dealer in fictitious 
values, a vender of obsolete wares. But nothing 
that was once real and vital is ever less than real 
and vital to the genius that penetrates to its 
heart and revitalizes it. In this sense " Quen- 
tin Durward " is as genuine and sincere as 
" Vanity Fair " or " Eugenie Grandet." Shake- 
speare is a better historian of Cleopatra, if the 
chief function of history is to make the dead 
live again, than Plutarch; and Scott is not to 
be counted less authoritative because he was a re- 
corder of life after the fact instead of contem- 
poraneous with it. Nor must it be forgotten 
that it was the soul of Feudalism which appealed 

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THE LAND OF SCOTT 

to his imagination ; " the spirit of chivalry, by 
which, as by a vivifying soul, that system was 
animated," " founded on generosity and self- 
denial." 

But Scott's absorption in feudalism has been 
greatly exaggerated; he was the delineator of 
chivalry in only three or four stories; in the 
great body of his work he was the recorder and 
interpreter of Scotland. In those romances 
Scotland lives in scores of men and women who 
are blood of her blood and bone of her bone. To 
recall these romances is to summon those fair 
apparitions in whom the pathos and tragedy 
of Scottish life are preserved against the touch 
of time: Jeanie and Effie Deans, Bessie Mac- 
lure, Di Vernon, Marie Stuart, Flora Maclvor, 
Lucy Ashton. In those pages live and move a 
long line of kings, gypsies, lawyers, preachers, 
judges, soldiers, farmers; men of the Border 
and of the Highlands, who not only keep for us 
the features of a past age, but reveal to us the 
secret of the heroism, the prodigal loyalty, the 
dour ruggedness, and the deep tenderness which 
have made Scotland the home of poetry and 
romance. 

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